I’ve got war refugees in my home today. I mean my daughter’s fellow second-year students from the animation program at Sapir College, located right next to Sderot. The campus is under fire and has shut its gates, so these budding cartoonists are unable to work on their projects or attend their classes. The studies are so intense, and the creative energy so high, that they all look like lost souls when they are denied their storyboards and cameras.

Their displacement is nothing compared to the suffering the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been enduring since Saturday, nor compared to that of the permanent residents of Sderot and other southern Israeli towns near Gaza, those who don’t have homes up north to flee to.

When my daughter and her classmates enrolled at Sapir, they knew they’d be studying under fire. But that advance knowledge doesn’t mean that they don’t long to study and draw in peace.

Israel’s attack on Gaza is unlikely to achieve that. Israelis should be wary by now of national leaders who promise that this war, finally, will end Palestinian (or Hezbollah, or whatever) attacks on Israel. It’s unlikely to bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza, as Tom Segev noted in yesterday’s Ha’aretz. Gazans aren’t the prisoners of Hamas tyranny—this is the government they chose, and pressure and suffering simply reinforces their solidarity and their loyalty to their leadership. And as my South Jerusalem blogging partner Gershom Gorenberg noted yesterday, we shouldn’t necessarily want Hamas to fall. A chaotic, leaderless Gaza Strip will be even worse for Israel than one ruled by Islamic militants.

The current operation is the bloodiest one Israel has ever launched against its Palestinian neighbors. Inevitably, in a place as densely populated as the Gaza Strip is, the civilian death toll is high. That will increase Palestinian and Arab resentment against Israel and lead again to charges from foreign governments and human rights organizations that Israel is guilty of war crimes. The death and destruction that Israel is wreaking on Gaza, they have already begun to charge, is incommensurate with the damage to property and only occasional loss of life inflicted by the missiles and mortars that Palestinian fire from Gaza into Israel.

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Enough to buoy our own head of state:

Olmert's popular support is nearing single figures in newspaper polls, mostly because of the Lebanon war, but also because of allegations of his involvement in alleged corruption including real estate deals and undue interference in government transactions to favor friends and backers. Olmert has denied any wrongdoing.