Israel-Gaza One year on: A chasm between viewpoints

YOU'LL BE AHEAD OF ME ON THIS ONE. By the time you read this, it's possible that Israel will have hit back in response to the ballistic missiles that Iran fired on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities last Tuesday. As I write, the world is bracing itself for that expected Israeli retaliation and what threatens to be an all-out regional war, pitting the Middle East's dominant powers against each other.

- Jonathan Freedland

The reason for that gap between us is that I am writing these words before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, which began at sunset last Wednesday.

By tradition, Jews are supposed to refrain from all work for the 48 hours that follow, work defined to include not only updating newspaper columns but watching the news on TV or checking your phone. I suspect I will not be the only Jew who will have struggled to comply with that stricture this year.

But you don't need a crystal ball to know that whenever that Israeli response comes, opinion will divide instantly and sharply, with two radically opposed views of what has just happened - mapping on to two wholly opposed views of Israel itself. That divide is part of what made this perhaps the hardest Rosh Hashanah that all but the oldest Jews can remember, one that came at the end of a dark and terrible year.

Here's what I mean about those two different views of Israel. There's the Israel you see on the news: the mighty bully, wildly lashing out at its neighbours, that, not content with turning much of Gaza into rubble, has now rolled its tanks into Lebanon - apparently for no better reason than because it can. This Israel is the one indicted by the world's courts, where it is accused of the most heinous crimes. This Israel has, for a year, brought out millions in mass demonstrations in the major cities of Europe, the US and beyond, a scale of protest unseen for two decades, politicising a generation that has decided that opposition to Israel is the great issue of our age.