the diameter of bullets: shfaram

God, I somehow missed this news until now. Yesterday a nineteen-year-old Israeli kid, who had become a member of a Kahanist right-wing group and gone AWOL from the IDF to protest the Gaza withdrawal, got on a bus full of Israeli Palestinians and opened fire. He killed four and injured many more before a mob stormed the bus and beat him to death. The Israeli government has been quick to label his actions a terrorist attack, and is denying him a military funeral and forbidding that his body be buried in the West Bank. His parents had apparently warned the IDF that he had moved to an extremist settlement and was still armed, and had asked the authorities to take his gun away, to no avail.

The Palestinian community within Israel marches and mourns, and criticizes the tolerance for anti-Arab rhetoric that makes them targets of right-wing anger.

I don't really have anything insightful to say about this, aside from a fervent hope that the Gaza withdrawal proceeds without further violence. I'll leave Yehuda Amichai's words, instead:

The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range--about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometers away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

-Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai & Ted Hughes)