Being a New Yorker outside of New York when disaster strikes is hard. I think we have some sort of mutated DNA that makes us deal with crap in a different way. A New York way. Like Hurricane Irene last year, only yeah, this time New York skepticism didn’t win out.
Obviously, this is a monster of a storm, doing incredible damage we’re only beginning to comprehend as the images come in from across the east Coast. Since the weekend, as I read friends’ posts about prepping for Hurricane Sandy, and spoke to family members hunkering down at home to wait it out, I couldn’t help but think of Sunday morning, when I heard that schools would be closed for southern Israeli students so they could stay in bomb shelters to wait out the falling missile attacks.
[Note: There’s no serious way to compare the two tragedies’ damage and experience. It’s ridiculous; and yet I’ve noticed people comparing news coverage of the two events, which is really unfair, so I’m addressing that here.]
Have you heard about the (new) recent round of Hamas rockets raining down on Israel? It’s not surprising that most of us haven’t. It’s a tired daily news story. People take a daily vitamin, daily walk, daily shit, and Southern Israel takes a daily pounding.
There’s a lot going on in the world. So the international media covers a lot. It’s up to people on the ground to share their stories, spread their experiences, and make sure the international community can relate to the daily terrorism in Southern Israel.
Let’s not rely on or blame solely the ‘mainstream media.’ The people’s internet, people.
Anyway, the mainstream media’s ignorance of the Hamas rocket attacks in Israel doesn’t make it less real, less terrifying, less terrorist, less traumatic for children, parents, residents and IDF soldiers who have to carry out orders for reactionary missions.
So maybe a visual will help drive it home – today, Ynet posted a video, apparently released by Hamas yesterday, and it’s pretty clear despite the fact they usually like to blur the background so we can’t tell exactly where they were sent from.
The trick is, this is clearly a populated area of Gaza, which from the launchers’ point of view is wonderful, since it would be hard for Israel to strike back and target the launchers without causing collateral damage.
Not so wonderful for the men, women and children who live there, who may end up collateral damage before those rockets reach Israel. By the way, Geneva Convention, anyone?
Here’s an infographic covering the types of rockets and their ranges in relation to Israeli areas:
Go ahead and share this. It doesn’t matter where you stand. Rockets aren’t good for Israel, and they’re not good for Gaza, either. They’re not good for Palestinians, Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, our children, our economies, our futures.
Palestinians suffer when Israelis suffer when Palestinians suffer when Israelis suffer…
Whadya got: