Some time after October 7th, 2023, I subscribed to the English-speaking Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, realizing that in the post-massacre wartime environment, where sides had been clearly chosen and would be rigidly policed, we were going to be subject to heavy-handed, propagandized news and information from our mainstream media outlets. Efforts to glean even slivers of anything approximating the truth would take more than the usual effort to filter through the noise and outrage on daily display. 
Obviously, my publication of choice reflected where my inclinations and political leanings toward this matter lie.
News to fit my views, I guess you might say. A charge difficult to refute, certainly. It just seemed like a necessary bulwark against the prevailing flood of officially approved executive summaries we were being inundated with at the time, a practice currently downgraded to basic neglect of coverage. If we don’t report it, it never happened. The world’s moved on. Why shouldn’t we?
Even within the pages of Haaretz, you can get that vibe, granted, usually near the back of the pages, in the lifestyle section.
Last weekend, two articles in this vein caught my attention.
‘We’re Part of the Wartime Baby Boom, and That Has Brought Happiness and Worries’ one headline read. ‘At 26.8, chef Amos Hayon honors values like locality and seasonality by using ingredients sourced from nearby producers in the Galilee’ was the subheadline of another. Both articles indirectly and directly make reference to the ongoing turmoil and upheaval in Israel but a reader could get the impression that these events are simply minor inconveniences for some people in the country. (No doubt, the ongoing war and unrelenting violence is little more than a minor convenience for some there.)
“We wanted to have kids even before the war, but even with it going on you realize that family is your thing—that you want to establish a family unit and expand it,” we are informed in one article.
And you try not to think that as of January this year, it’s very likely that Israel is responsible for the death of at least 18,000 Palestinian children since October 2023.
“The war changed something in me,” says a chef who’s finally managed to open a second restaurant, this one in the northern city of Safed. “I’ve become less interested in culinary affectations and more grounded. It really hit me how important it is to support our farmers and local producers. Buying directly from them, honoring their work—that’s crucial. It shows up in the food, too. It’s simpler now, more honest, more connected to the land than anything I was doing before.”
And you try not to think about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Palestinians, now displaced from their homes, their land and facing the very real possibility of never re-connecting with it again.
It is easy, as you can see, to get very, very self-righteous about all of this.
Kudos to you, for getting on with your life, raising a family, a family unit with the hopes of expanding it, while the bodies pile up around your little idyll. Good on you buddy, acknowledging the war’s impact on your culinary pretensions. More grounded now. More in touch with the local farmers and producers and the land itself, a land but a stone’s throw away from the occupied Golan Heights.
How dare they, right?
They are either oblivious to the mass murder, oppression and dispossession being conducted in their name by their government or they condone it. All of it.
Moral monsters, in other words.
Of course,
here I sit, thousands of kilometres, an ocean and a couple continents away, securely tucked in at my desk, pointing digital fingers. My family safe and sound. The oppression and genocidal bloodshed done in my name, now dusty and filed in distant archives or, chewed over and tended to in cold administrative language of reconciliation or, being picked through at a Manitoba landfill. 
Hey! I’m also a big fan of eating local. From land forcibly acquired in acts only grudgingly acknowledged.
I too am a moral monster.
So who am I to cast stones?
We are all living in wartime, in one way or another, regardless of how removed from the actual fighting.
My battle, far from any front, is not with those individuals choosing to appear in the soft sections of newspapers, ‘Holylandings’, in this case. Walk a mile in their shoes and the like. Personally, I’d avoid publicly putting my sunny hopeful face and words to a murderous regime conducting ongoing ethnic cleansing. Hoping that your young son grows up in a world where he will only have to be ‘a computer combat fighter’ does not lighten the horror for those on the other side of the screen.
But that’s just me.
I’m not raising children or going to restaurants in the direct shadow of war. My character has never been tested in dire circumstances of any sort of possible existential threat. It’s mere wishful thinking that I’d act any differently than the chef in Safed or the young mother vacationing in Bangkok. If things continue on the path we find ourselves now globally, I may get the opportunity to test that hypothesis.