By Kathleen Kern

During this summer’s war between Hezbollah and Israel, one news photo became emblematic of Israeli civilian suffering. It shows a man in a blue T-shirt playing his piano while his dog pants behind him. Shards of glass and other detritus resulting from a Hezbollah rocket attack cover the floor.

	Israeli peace activist Shaul Feldman plays his piano amid the wreckage left by a Hezbollah rocket attack.

On the day before a Katyusha damaged their home, Feldman and Gur had joined about 5,000 other Israelis in Tel Aviv, calling for an end to Israel’s bombing of mostly civilian Lebanese.

The bombings killed 1,200 Lebanese civilians, one-third of whom were children. Hezbollah killed 44 Israeli civilians, eight of whom were children and 19 of whom were Israeli Arabs.

The next day, sitting in their back room, they heard an explosion at the front of their house. The press arrived as Feldman was testing the piano to see if it still worked. Reporters asked him whether the rocket assault had changed his mind about protesting the war.

“If there is today another demonstration, I’m a bit busy as you can see,” he told reporters. “But I would have joined it, even if only in spirit, because these are the results of the fighting, both here and on the other side. We are planting now the seeds for the next war.”

These sentiments, however, did not appear in most of the international media. To help rectify the omission, Feldman was invited to be the keynote speaker at an antiwar demonstration in Tel Aviv on Aug. 5. Nearly 10,000 people attended. Proportionately, that would be like 500,000 people showing up for an antiwar rally in the United States.

“I should have thought that the photo of a man playing the piano in a ruined house should have sent a message of peace,” he told the throng. “But I saw the photo with all kinds of very warlike captions, which implied that I want revenge from the inhabitants of Lebanon.

“I called the press and protested and told them I had participated in the antiwar demonstration. They said: ‘Oh, but did you not change your mind when your house was bombed?’

“Change my mind? I have protested against the stupid, wanton destruction of war, and then the war and destruction came to my own home. Should that make me change my mind?”

One would think Feldman’s story would appeal to the U.S. media, given its penchant for human-interest stories — like the recent rehashing of the JonBenet Ramsey murder. But I saw Feldman’s comments nowhere other than in the Israeli alternative press.

Looking again at the picture of Feldman playing his piano, I wonder whether the axiom, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is true. Sometimes, even the best pictures need a few more words of explanation.

Addendum: During the war with Hezbollah, the Israeli military killed 136 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, one quarter of whom were children. On July 28, an Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom, put out a newspaper ad that read:

While the eyes of the public
Are riveted to the
Daily bloodletting in Lebanon
The wholesale killing
In the Gaza Strip
Is going on.
Women and children
Are also killed
Every day.
This bill, too,
Will be presented to us
In the future.