Out of the chaos of the past weeks, three images fix themselves in my mind.
The first: a fragment from the Sunday night news. A young boy, sitting at the bedside of his injured, bandaged brother declares that ‘they’ should have to suffer like this. ‘They’ should have to pay. I don’t even remember now whether the boy was Israeli or Lebanese.
The second: the blackened, pocked face of Australian, John Tulloch, as he emerged last year from London’s Edgware Road Tube Station, swathed in an incongruous, violet emergency blanket. His bare chest is vulnerable and pink, his head bandage held in place by a blue silk tie. From his suit buttons dangles a green label: PRIORITY 3.
The third: a view from a balcony. A Jewish friend forwards me an email from an Israeli woman, Gila Svirsky, who has just bought an apartment under construction in Nahariya, five miles south of the Lebanese border. ‘The sweetest little town on the Mediterranean coast’, she calls it. But now, ‘had the balcony already been built, we would have been able to watch the Israeli navy array itself along the coast, laying siege to Lebanon.’
If only the boy could be educated by the woman. If only the man could mentor both boys.
Gila Svirsky has seen the damage done by Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets. She has also seen the Israeli shelling of Gaza and Lebanon. She condones neither. ‘As if shelling is sure to make the Hezbollah leaders remorseful and let our boys come home.’
She and the boy might ask one another who is meant by ‘they’. Given time, perhaps they might make a tentative start on ‘we’.
John Tulloch has spent his own time lying in hospital, bandaged and vertiginous, with glass shrapnel extruding from his body. Now he has turned the experience into a first person account. A professor of media and sociology, Tulloch has written One Day in July (published by Little, Brown), a book in which he refuses to be seen just as a victim. Just as resolutely, he won’t be co-opted into the ‘war on terror’.
The most moving part of Tulloch’s book is its postscript, ‘Another, better day’, addressed to Mohammad Sidique Khan, the young Englishman who sat briefly across the carriage from Tulloch before detonating his bomb. Tulloch talks about his several memories of Khan, including a photograph and description of him as a