Parsing the Refusal: Why Are Israeli Fears Seen as Irrelevant?

Over the past few months, as the progressive blogosphere rallied in support of the Palestinian victims of Israel's invasion, there has been scant mention of the Israeli victims of the conflict. One one level, this makes sense: the death toll is 1300+ Palestinians compared to only thirteen Israelis.

There is one idea that does get a lot of repetition. It does like this:

Palestinian rockets are homemade, inaccurate, and have causes such a small amount of destruction, they serve only as a pretext for Israeli attacks, not as a real military threat.

The motives for saying this are understandable. By minimizing the harm done to Israelis, we make its actions in Gaza appear more disproportionate and easier to condemn. In the war of public opinion, any sympathy garnered by Israeli victims is seen as a point scored by the Israeli PR machine, as though sympathy is a zero sum game.

Only.... living with the threat of rockets falling on you or you children is not an insignificant harm. It seems odd to have to explain this. The Israelis do not argue that rocket fire was a mortal threat to the Israeli threat, they argued that it was an unacceptable situation for civilians to live with the threat of rockets. Which is true. It is unacceptable. The argument that can be made is that the rockets could have been stopped by talking to Hamas and lifting the siege, as opposed to engaging in a full out assault. To say that the harm caused by rockets is marginal and unworthy of public mention is to say that the Israeli experience of the conflict is not central to resolving it.

That's just not true. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be resolved when - and only when - there is a broad enough majority of both Israelis and Palestinians to end it. Until that time comes, all efforts to marginalize the experiences of one side only serve to harden positions.