These images astonish us with their cruelty: Israeli soldiers kicking the bodies of three Palestinians, wounded or perhaps dead, from a rooftop. The key to the horror lies simply in the physical presence of the attackers. There are none left. Any aerial bombardment also throws human bodies out of windows and roofs, dismembers them in an atrocious manner, subjects them to long agonies, but the intermediation of the aircraft and the distance of the killer seem to sanitize the affair.
Not in terms of results, of course: the images coming from Gaza after an airstrike are quite expressive. The effect on the observer is, however, different. We are more outraged by homemade torture and murder than by industrial massacres. For some reason, a bombing offends us less. Headlines similar to this one abound: “Israeli missile kills six children.” As if it were the missile’s fault. If we read something different with the same result, something like “Israeli soldier kills six children,” the impact would be much greater. It is the human factor that makes the difference.
