Sometimes reality intrudes and you almost wish it wouldn't

This is a story that is both heartbreaking and encouraging. Encouraging, because problems do not get solved until people put aside their illusions, face up to reality, and decide to pay the price that real solutions demand.

Heartbreaking, because...well, you are more callous than I am, if you can get to the end of this piece and not be fighting back tears as Avrahami says:

Eighteen years after finishing my military service -- almost two decades after swearing that I would never again wear a uniform -- I called the Israeli consulate and gave them my phone number. If the army needed me, I told them, I would be the first on a plane back to Israel. And Sharon, of course, has not woken from his coma. But I miss him.

And why should that be heartbreaking? Well, you have to know Zeev Avrahami's story.

It is good to be without illusions, especially when the illusions are deadly (and the illusions of the reflexively anti-war are among the deadliest of all illusions). And yet, think what it says about life in the Holy Land, that a good and kind man like Avrahami, with his personal history and his convictions and his compassion for Palestinian suffering and his longing for simple peace for all, can be driven to miss Ariel Sharon...

Heartbreaking.

HT: Stanley Kurtz