May 21, 2025

 Wednesday. Left a little before ten. Milder than anticipated, in spite of the thin, gray-white cloud cover almost everywhere. Winds out of the northwest. Leidseweg to Daphne bridge to the canals. Pleasure boats co-determining the route this time of year: straight at Jutphaas to Vreeswijk. There, more pleasure boats, leading to extra traffic in the Molenstraat. Tull en 't Waal, then Elpad, with the sheep only half-visible in the tall grass. Kaaiweg and Korte Uitweg to ARK bridge and Achterdijk. Baled-up hay wrapped in plastic has been out in the fields for a week or two. Odijk, Bunnik, Vossegatsedijk back into the city to Mos. In the newspaper more of the push-back you still hear regularly to the growing criticism of the Israeli campaign in Gaza. "But Hamas ..." is what it tends to boil down to. A variation is: "this all started on October 7." Hamas, of course, is highly relevant, even now, in its diminished state. However, implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, to use its actions and ideas (despicable indeed) as justification of anything Israel does vis-a-vis the population of Gaza (or the West Bank, for that matter) is wholly unconvincing, as is the idea that you could eradicate Hamas. Given the situation in that part of the world, eradicating Palestinian extremism is as unrealistic as thinking the extremists on the Israeli side will soon disappear. The extremists on both sides deserve each other; the tragedy, or crime, is all the innocent people caught in the middle. But we should expect a good deal more judgment from a country calling itself a democracy than we have seen from the Israeli government in the past year-and-a-half. Also, this didn't start on October 7; it's just the latest round in a deeply tragic history going back more than a century, perhaps even longer. There's enough blame to go around there too, which can make the current situation appear even more hopeless. And maybe it is. But maybe the moderate voices in the region can still reassert themselves, maybe enough people still realize that the current course, set by the extremists, leads nowhere. Then you wouldn't have a solution, but perhaps the beginning of a conversation, and that would be something.