Another day, another corpse. Israel’s fragile truce has been tested yet again, with one dead and five wounded in a fresh shooting. The reports trickle in like clockwork, each one a grim reminder that peace in this region is but a fleeting illusion.
We like to pretend that treaties and handshakes can paper over millennia of animosity, but history laughs at such naivety. This is the same script that played out in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in every fault line of human civilisation. The truce was never going to hold.
It never does. The real question is why we continue to be surprised. Perhaps it is because we have forgotten that conflict is the natural state of man, and peace merely the interlude.
The dead man’s name will be forgotten within the week, his life reduced to a statistic in a news cycle that moves on as quickly as it arrived. Five injured? They will be tomorrow’s footnote.
And yet we demand our leaders ‘do something’ as if they possess a magic wand that can undo centuries of bloodshed. They cannot. The cycle will continue, because it always does.
The fall of Rome did not happen in a day, nor did the Great War. But we see the signs if we care to look: the erosion of trust, the rise of extremism, the failure of diplomacy. This shooting is not an aberration.
It is the new normal.
