When the Rabbis of yore sought to explain why Balaam, the non-Hebrew biblical prophet, was so eager to close a deal with Moabian King Balak though God was utterly opposed to it, the Rabbis concluded that Balaam was blind in one eye, metaphorically that is.
Alice Walker, the renowned author and a Pulitzer laureate, is similarly blind in one eye, notwithstanding her weighty literary credentials. On March 8, the Missourian reported that Walker is traveling to Gaza “to highlight the devastation of the (recent) Israeli offensive on Gaza’s residents."
Where was Ms. Walker during the last three years when Israel pulled out its military and civilians from the Gaza Strip and Palestinian terrorist organizations reacted by firing daily rockets and mortar shells on nearby Israeli towns? By going only to Gaza, Ms. Walker, the writer of “The Color Purple,” is choosing to close one eye. If she only opened it, that one eye would also see the traumatized children of the Israeli town of Sderot who, upon hearing the Emergency Broadcast System calling: “The Red Color,” have only 15 seconds to make it to a sheltered space before explosion. Similarly, the PTA in the Israeli city of Ashkelon refused to allow students to attend their unprotected schools. In response, Israel’s government has just allocated 20 million shekels for constructing safe areas in Ashkelon’s schools to help and protect pupils from incoming Gaza rockets.
In siding automatically with those they perceive as the “underdog", radical liberals such as Ms. Walker shut their other eye from seeing that it was the people of Gaza – the proverbial “underdog” — who elected Hamas to govern them in the first place. And it is this government that has been using them as a human shield in the belief that Israel would be deterred from attacking Gaza’s terrorists, though they continue to operate deliberately from within civilian neighborhoods by launching rockets into Israel.