From Slate.com: Two Different Takes on Conflict in Israel

Since I have a soft spot for online news and magazines, I looked to Slate.com for some insightful–though not breaking news–coverage of the violence in Gaza. Magazines are the perfect platform for explainer pieces and columns, and that’s what I chose this week.

The first piece, Katy Waldman’s “Rockets! Quick, Jump Into This Water Main. Why are Israelis taking cover inside concrete pipes?” was a great little explainer piece, perfect for contextualizing all the photos we’ve seen in the past couple weeks of anxious Israeli families huddled inside large concrete pipes to escape the bombs and rockets. Explaining something we see frequently but don’t know the story behind is an interesting means of adding to the conversation about an event in a meaningful, helpful and fresh way.

Waldman explained they were distributed to neighborhoods in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 by the Israeli Home Front Command to serve as impromptu bomb shelters. Waldman explains the history of the Home Front Command and the history of bomb shelters in Israel since 1951. Although theses pipes provide some protection, they don’t make the people inside them feel more secure or confident in the chance for peace in Gaza. To bring this point home, Waldman quotes an Israeli blogger’s opinion on the pipes:

The two young men … informed me that the Home Front Command was planning on bringing in large sewer pipes. Yes, you read that correctly, sewer pipes, made of thick concrete, for our protection. …When the sirens wail, we are to run outside, crawl into our very own sewer pipe and wait five minutes, or at least until we hear the explosion. Then we crawl out and return to our cardboard homes. … I laugh as I write this. I have tears in my eyes as I write this.

This personal take on the violence and the ways it tears at communities, nations, and individuals is what makes Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick’s article, “I didn’t come back to Jerusalem to be in a war: What it’s like to be in Israel as the conflict escalates,” so compelling. She’s not reporting breaking news, nor is she explaining something related to breaking news more in-depth like Waldman’s article, but Lithwick is explaining what it’s like for an American to be in Israel with her family while rockets fly:

You want to hear about what it’s like here? It’s f***ing sad. Everyone I know is sad. My kids don’t care who started it and the little boys in Issawiya, the Arab village I see out my window, don’t care much either. I haven’t met a single Israeli who is happy about this. They know this fixes nothing. The one thing we learned this week is how quickly humans can come to normalize anything. But the hopelessness seeps right into your bones as well.

The column captures the emotions of the situation well and uses an American narrator with deep Israeli ties as a bridge to share the experience of the bombings with American readers who might find the experience hard to imagine.

And even though it’s a column told in first person, Lithwick still tells readers about the history of Gaza, recounting what it was like when Israel and Egypt made peace for the first time 35 years ago. Having the emotional context of a current event is another type of explanation that we often leave out of news reporting for various reasons. But it’s an important part of the story and it’s worth telling in order to share with our audiences a more in-depth, nuanced view of a story.