When I saw a picture of Omer Goldman, a high school girl who is refusing to join the Israeli military, I promptly put it on my blog, and this piece about her in a British publication starts with the important news that she "is a very pretty girl" and has even better fotos. Got that? She is also the daughter of a former Mossad boss. Golden's epiphany was anything but pretty:
Omer told me that the crucial moment of her metamorphosis occurred
this year when she went to a Palestinian village where the IDF had set
up a roadblock. Someone she had considered her enemy all her life stood
beside her and someone who was supposed to be defending her opened fire
at her.
"We were sitting by the roadside talking and soldiers came along
and after a few seconds they received an order and fired gas grenades
and rubber bullets at us. Then it struck me, to my astonishment, that
the soldiers were following an order without thinking. For the first
time in my life an Israeli soldier raised his weapon and fired at me."
I'd note that the author, Igal Sarna, is an Israeli whose son is about to join the military. And this month Foreign Affairs has a (too-positive) review of Benny Morris's book 1948, by Shlomo Ben-Ami, another Israeli (too positive because Ben-Ami fails to note Morris's elision of Palestinian oral testimony, among other reasons). Israelis writing about Israelis for a western audience. I'd like to see other voices in the mix.
