There are pictures and there are pictures and as newspapermen we know them all.
We print them to inform and sometimes to move and outrage.
Sometimes we print them with just a hint of cynicism.
But there are pictures and there are pictures.
The pictures now coming out of Gaza are pretty horrific. Nothing is worse than a dead baby.
We should be outraged.
But somehow we aren’t.
Or at least not much.
There are other pictures that come to mind.
Not more than a month ago the same grown-ups wailing over the corpses of their dead children were photographed dancing with them in the streets giving them candy and cheap toys.
It was a spontaneous public party. Hamas did not organize it.
The reason for the this outpouring of joy?
Three Jewish teenagers were killed.
Before the boys’ bodies were found there was a spontaneous internet sensation of little Gazan children smiling and holding up three fingers and texting how happy they were that three Jewish kids had been taken from their families.
We don’t blame the kids.
But we really don’t like them either. And as for their parents whether ‘innocent’ civilians or not we cannot say our hearts go out to them.
They gave their kids candy to celebrate the murder of other kids.
And we know that if our kids our grandchildren were murdered it would be a cause for a similar celebration.
Perhaps we are too close to the situation to be sympathetic to the enemy.
We are reminded of the time we watched a World War II documentary with our grandfather.
Archival footage of Berlin after the war block upon devastated block and hundreds of starving Germans sifting through the rubble.
‘God damn Nazi bastards got what the deserved,’ he said.
‘Grand pop not every German was a Nazi,’ I said appalled as only a 15 year old moron could say to a man who sent two sons to war and lost his sister in the Holocaust.
‘They all went to the rallies and they all had a grand time when Germany was winning the war,’ he replied. ‘By the way does you father know you are an idiot?’
Back then we believed my grandfather to be a bitter old man who simply did not understand that peace and love were better than war and hate.
Back then I was indeed an idiot.
Peace and love might be a whole lot better than war but only if both sides agree.
And the disagreement Hamas has with Israel is that Israel and by that word they don’t mean the only the nation state but the entire people of Israel should die.
That includes 15 year old idiots of which I once was, old men of which I am now and two month old babies of which our own grandson is numbered. And they, men women and children, would celebrate our deaths with cries of Allah hu Akbar and candy.
So those photos, sometimes staged, for world consumption do not move us.
Indeed we view them with a grim satisfaction.
We do not rejoice, we don’t even smile. But we are satisfied that anyone who would dance on our children’s graves are being lowered into their own.