The magazine of my alma mater, Syracuse University, arrived in the mail last Wednesday. Its jacket, typically glossy, was for this issue a pleasing, roughly textured matte, perhaps intended to conciliate alumni like myself who — uninterested in reading about the school's banal leftism — seldom get past the cover before throwing the periodical out.
I thumbed the last few pages of collegial announcements, then looked at content. One page featured a West Bank tour by an SI Newhouse School of Public Communications photojournalism graduate. Beneath an artful print of two little girls tripping through the same interstice in Israel's security barrier a terrorist bomber would, the alumnus described the town of Qalqilyah as "encircled" by the barrier and therefore "at the mercy of the Israeli government," a quotation accompanied by the editors' relation that the locality was "thriving farmland, now devastated."
The girdling of Qalqilyah is actual. Justification for such a thing, of course, is lost in the other two oblique phrases. Removed is the town's anchorage in the Islamist gang war and the extrusive danger therefrom.
Can Israel's government be blamed for defense of a state that is itself surrounded? Jerusalem has lately been provisioning foodstuffs to Gaza residents after the region's usurpation by Hamas. Also, indirectly, condoning the civilian use of "organic eggs, corn, mango, tomatoes and other vegetables" as projectiles — delectably ripe return-fire to terrorists' rockets launched at the Jewish city of Sderot. Mercy, indeed.