Jessica Apple bor i Tel Aviv.
Hun har lite til overs for hvordan Israels ledere har gått frem i senere tid, og uttrykker stor bekymring i denne kronikken i NYTimes.
Jeg liker å følge disse konfliktene gjennom utsagn fra dem som befinner seg i dem. Apple er fullstendig klar over at det er valg i Israel i januar, og at israelere er begynt å gå lei av Netanyahu. (Netanyahu trakk også svarteper pga sin lefling med Romney, og har behov for å lage bråk nå.)
Jessica Apple er tydeligvis en klarsynt kvinne. Ellers anbefaler jeg Haaretz. Merk også rekkefølgen på hva som kom først av drap på en Hamas leder og avfyrte raketter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/o...=opinion&gwh=D807960A0EAA43FAFFB2321B683F2FC0
 SINCE Wednesday, when 
Israel killed Hamas’s military chief, Ahmed al-Jabari, in the 
Gaza Strip,  Hamas had fired rockets and mortars only into southern Israel. So on  Friday, when I heard an air-raid siren sound in Tel Aviv, I assumed it  was a test. But just for a moment. Then I snapped to my senses, grabbed  my phone and ran to my apartment building’s stairs. I began to make my  way down, running at first, thinking only of my three young sons. Two  were in a judo lesson. One was with his grandmother. I could not get to  them.        
 On the second-floor landing, I paused. My heart was racing, but my legs  wouldn’t. I was weighing my options, and none seemed good. And eight  steps above the lobby of my building I came to a very somber conclusion:  this is how life is going to be here, and I can’t change it. Hope for a  peaceful Israel is diminishing.        
 We have no one to make peace with, says the voice on the street. That  may be true, but so is this: In Israel, too, our leaders — on all sides —  have failed to move toward peace.        
 Yes, peace negotiations with Hamas are questionable. But just a few weeks ago, the 
Palestinian president, 
Mahmoud Abbas,  said that he would not allow a third intifada to break out, and that  although he is a refugee from Safed, a city in northern Israel, he 
does not intend to return  there as anything but a tourist. “Palestine for me,” he said, “is the  1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital; this is Palestine, I am  a refugee, I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine,  everything else is Israel.” The office of Israel’s prime minister,  Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by saying, “There is no connection between  the Palestinian Authority chairman’s statement and his actual actions.”         
 Mr. Netanyahu has been ignoring the peace process for most of his  current four-year term. For the first time since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir  Arafat shook hands in 1993, and as Israel prepares to elect a new  Knesset in January, its political leaders are not talking about a  two-state solution.        
 When I moved to Israel 15 years ago, the picture was very different.  There was never a question of whether Israel and the Palestinians would  make peace, only of when. The dream of peace inspired me, and even after  an intifada, scores of suicide bombings and a war, I stayed in Israel. I  remained hopeful.        
 But today, as the missiles get closer to Tel Aviv, I think of leaving.  It’s not the missiles that are breaking me. It’s the lack of an  alternative to them.        
 Mr. Netanyahu has avoided the Palestinian issue while enabling and  encouraging settlement building; he has ignored the Arab initiative and  focused solely on the threat of Iran. Late last month he 
struck a coalition deal  with his ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to have  their two parties run one slate in the next elections in January. It  signaled that Mr. Netanyahu would have no plans to make peace if he were  re-elected.        
 Now Mr. Netanyahu has chosen to enter into a conflict that ensures that  the vote in the upcoming elections will be about security — something he  says he can provide. There is no great surprise in that. The surprise  is that there is no opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s policies — a signal  that Israelis are resigned to living indefinitely with the threat of  war.        
 Israel’s Labor Party — Yitzhak Rabin’s party — which has traditionally  stood for peace, has, instead, been quiet on the Israeli-Palestinian  issue. Under the leadership of a journalist turned politician, Shelly  Yachimovich, Labor has reshaped itself into a social democratic party  focused on social justice, the cost of living and the middle class. Last  year, demonstrations touched off by the rising cost of cottage cheese  drew half a million Israelis to the streets to protest the high cost of  living. Ms. Yachimovich seized social justice as an issue and became its  political face.        
 But she skirted the Palestinian issue. She has not promised to stop  settlement building and has never acknowledged the hypocrisy of calling  for social justice within the 
Green Line,  which marks the limits of Israel proper, while ignoring the lack of it  in the Palestinian territories beyond. If you were to define today’s  Labor, you might say it’s the party that represents Israelis’ right to  fairly priced cheese. Some Labor figures still press for peace  negotiations, of course, but their voices don’t get through.        
 And as Israel pummels the Gaza Strip, there is no Israeli political  leader saying, as Rabin did, “Enough of blood and tears.” Ms.  Yachimovich has, in fact, supported the government’s actions as just,  without questioning whether they are wise.        
 How the situation in Gaza plays out is likely to determine the outcome  of Israel’s election. I feel safe in saying that this January, Israelis  will be casting a vote for peace or war. Will Israel bury the two-state  solution once and for all, or can it somehow retain a hope of being a  Jewish democratic state living in peace with its neighbors? Last night  as I said good night to my older sons, I set their flip-flops in front  of their beds. “If you hear a siren,” I said, “slide your feet into your  shoes and run downstairs.” I would grab our 3-year-old, I said, and be  right behind them. “Don’t wait for me. Just go.”        
 There aren’t too many years before today’s flip-flops become tomorrow’s  army boots, and I do not want my sons to grow up to a never-ending  conflict that Israel accepts as immutable. I do agree that Israel has  the right to protect its citizens. But I condemn Israel’s current  leaders for failing to recognize that the best defense is peace.        
     
Jessica Apple, a writer in Tel Aviv, is a co-founder and editor in chief of the diabetes magazine 
ASweetLife.org.