After years of simmering tensions and small-ish outbreaks of violence, which from my vantage point appeared to be quieting down rather than heating up, Israel and Palestine are at war.
It's not something I'm equipped to cover on this blog. This is a movie blog. The horrors of war are not something I dig into deeply. I've never had a geopolitical mind and though I am of course compelled to read about these horrors to stay across what's happening, I don't struggle to understand the minutiae of these conflicts, particularly the minutiae that contributed to them happening in the first place.
But this particular one, no more or less sad than the Ukraine conflict (at least not yet), hit close to home. That's only one of the reasons I'm writing about it today, the other being that the inherent frivolity of my posts seems callous if I don't write a post like this at a time like this.
On Sunday, an Egyptian police officer opened fire on an Israeli tourist group in Alexandria, his personal instinct to expand the borders of this war. He killed two people and injured a couple others.
My wife's aunt and uncle were in the next tour group over. In fact, my wife's uncle even thinks he saw the shooter.
They're okay. That's not the point.
The point is that we really don't know what the full effects of such a conflict could be, given the hatred that exists on both sides of it, and the likelihood of retributions on allies -- which include people who may not even realize that's how they are characterized in the eyes of the desperate and the angry.
I'm already starting to imagine that somehow the two conflicts currently going on will whip themselves up into a nuclear conflagration that engulfs the whole world. I'm not sure the sorts of philosophical alignments exist to pair various combatants with other combatants, but as we all know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
For now, I don't hope to understand it all, though in this case, the causes go back decades.
Why now? I guess that's the part I don't understand.
I still cherish the frivolity of writing about movies, an escape from these other issues that dominate our thoughts with regrettable frequency. The next post you read on this blog will be that sort of post.
But when something has just occurred that some people are calling "Israel's 9/11," well, you'll find no frivolity here today.
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