Israeli strikes kill eight in southern Lebanon including children

Well, they announced another round of strikes in southern Lebanon, which I suppose makes sense if you don’t think about it too long, which is probably the idea. It seems we have reached a point in our diplomatic history where the most effective way to secure peace is to ensure that everyone involved is too busy running for their lives to notice how much they hate each other. It is a bold strategy, really. It relies on the assumption that exhaustion is a form of agreement, and that if you keep the noise loud enough, nobody will have the energy to ask why we are still doing this.

I was reading the reports from Tuesday, and it appears that eight people were killed, including children. Now, I am not a man who likes to dwell on the grim details, but when the grim details involve little ones who haven’t even learned to tie their shoes yet, it tends to stick in the craw. The official line, of course, is that this is about security. It is always about security. It is the one word that can justify any action, from building a fence to leveling a city. If you say you are doing it for security, you are not a warmonger; you are a protector. It is a very convenient label, like calling a tax increase a “contribution to national stability.”

The thing about these border conflicts is that they have a way of becoming their own industry. You have the politicians in Washington and the diplomats in Geneva, all very serious, all very concerned, and all very far away from the mud. They speak of “escalation risks” and “regional stability” as if these were abstract concepts, like interest rates or the weather. But down in southern Lebanon, stability is not a concept. It is the absence of a bomb falling on your kitchen table. It is the ability to send your children to school without wondering if they will make it home. The people making the decisions have never had to pack a bag in three minutes because the sky turned black. They have never had to explain to a child why the house is gone. This gap between the map and the ground is where the trouble starts.

And let us not forget the other side of the fence. Hezbollah is there, too, playing its part in this grand theater of mutual destruction. They claim to be resisting occupation; Israel claims to be defending its citizens. Both sides are right, in their own minds, and both sides are wrong, in the eyes of anyone who values a quiet Tuesday. It is a classic case of two men arguing over who has the right to stand in the doorway, while the house burns down around them. The politicians on both sides get to look strong. The generals get to look busy. The arms manufacturers get to look prosperous. The only ones who look foolish are the families who have to live in the rubble.

I often wonder if the leaders of these nations ever sit down and have a honest conversation, not about strategy, but about sense. If you were a farmer, and your neighbor kept throwing rocks at your barn, you might get angry. You might even throw a rock back. But you wouldn’t burn down the whole farm just to prove a point. You would fix the fence. You would talk to the neighbor. You would find a way to coexist, because you both need the land to grow your corn. But politicians do not grow corn. They grow headlines. And a headline about a strike is much more exciting than a headline about a fence repair.

The stakes, as they call them, are high. The risk of further conflict is real. But the real risk is not that the war will spread. The real risk is that we will forget why we started it in the first place. We will get so caught up in the mechanics of the conflict - the missiles, the statements, the condemnations - that we will lose sight of the simple fact that people are dying. And not just soldiers. Not just combatants. Children. Grandmothers. People who just wanted to live their lives.

So, what are we to do? Well, we can’t do much, except watch. We can watch the politicians spin their wheels. We can watch the diplomats write their reports. We can watch the news cycle turn, day after day, bringing us the same bad news in a slightly different font. And we can shrug. Not because we don’t care, but because we know that caring is not the same as controlling. The folks back home, they know this. They know that the world is a messy place, and that the people in charge are often more interested in looking good than in doing good.

It is a sad state of affairs, but it is not a surprising one. We have been here before. We will be here again. The only question is whether we will learn anything from it. I doubt it. But I hope so. Because if we don’t, we are just waiting for the next Tuesday, and the next, and the next, until there is nothing left but the noise. And the noise, as we all know, is not a very good place to raise a family.