A DOUBLE-HEADER: Two great piesces from Yossi Klein Halevi. The first one is in today's LA Times:

We Israelis watch the growing outrage against us and wonder whether the world has gone mad. How is it possible, we ask each other, that after suffering an unprecedented terrorist campaign, we're portrayed as bullies for finally trying to uproot the threat? Why does so much of the world seem to get indignant not when Israelis are being massacred and turned into a nation of terrorized shut-ins but when we hit back?
Tragically, the anti-terrorist offensive has caused great suffering and dislocation among innocent Palestinians. Any war that is televised produces horrific images. But the crucial moral difference between the Israeli government and Yasser Arafat's regime is that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians. In fact, rather than use Israel's mighty air power to attack terrorist enclaves, the army has sent infantry into the narrow alleyways of West Bank towns.
There is no fully surgical way to fight the war of survival that has been forced on Israel. Indeed, no national movement has ever fought a dirtier and less justified war than the Palestinians, who could have ended the occupation had they accepted President Clinton's plan and who have since violated every civilized norm--from hiding gunmen behind priests in a holy place to smuggling suicide bombers in ambulances.
...U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has sarcastically asked whether the whole world can be wrong and only Israel right. The same question could have been asked in 1981, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Then, too, the "whole world" condemned Israel as an outlaw. But who today isn't quietly grateful to Israel for having prevented Saddam Hussein from acquiring the bomb?
The Israeli army is performing a similar service for humanity today by establishing the principle that terrorism won't be indulged. Perhaps one day that too will be acknowledged.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the diplomatic siege against the Jewish state is being accompanied in Europe by the worst outbreak of violent anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, with Jews being beaten in Berlin and synagogues burned in France.
...Most Israelis have given up on the Europeans, who are seen here as incurable appeasers. But don't we have the right to expect more of Americans, especially at this fateful time?
Absolutely.
The second piece is in The Jewish Week. He describes the ways Israelis try to cope with the omnipresent threat of terror, with the following conclusions:
Yasir Arafat has inadvertently helped us cope by restoring to us a belief in the basic justness of our cause. Probably not since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Arab armies attacked Israel on its holiest day, have Israelis been less morally conflicted. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, followed by the first intifada of the late 1980s, demoralized and divided us. Now, though, most Israelis believe that we’re fighting for our lives.
“I’ve never felt more certain about why we have to fight,” said a friend of mine, a former paratrooper whose son was drafted recently into one of the army’s elite commando units. “That’s what allows me to sleep at night — when I can.”
Daily life persists; inertia sometimes can feel like victory. It is a relief to recall that not every ambulance siren announces a terrorist attack: Even during war, people are born, get sick and die of natural causes. Last week, I attended a memorial for a colleague, a survivor of the 20th century’s wars who’d managed to remain alive until the age of 82. Near the entrance to the cemetery were posted funeral notices for one of the young victims from Cafe Moment. My colleague’s widow greeted us with a smile. “At a time like this,” she said, “we have to put things in perspective. Michael lived a full life; there are other tragedies to mourn.”
The comfort of an ordinary death.