PARIS — When the unthinkable burst onto TV screens Saturday, I flashed back to Hebron in 1996. My AP dispatch began: “After four deadly days, Jews and Arabs have forced down the lid on Pandora’s Box, but few Palestinians speak of the ‘peace process’ without a sneer or a sigh.”

And now this.

Reporters who have watched Holy Land horror over generations were stunned, like everyone else, at Hamas’ cruel coordinated onslaught that caught Israeli intelligence off guard. But few were surprised that smoldering hatreds had finally flamed into a likely unwinnable war.

A thundering artillery prelude killed 700 men, women and children in Gaza by Tuesday as the death toll in Israel reached 900. Armored columns amassed at the border to roll in.

Israel might cripple Hamas, but the fallout could be worse. Across the world, people are befuddled by contradictory sources, mistaken impressions and unshakeable bias at opposing extremes. The threat of Middle East war — and spiking antisemitism — is hard to exaggerate.

The need to fight back hard unites fractious Israeli parties. But in Washington, self-serving Republicans and a speaker-less House hamstring a road-tested president who pledges support to a close ally while trying to push it toward lasting coexistence with Palestine.

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PARIS — I lost it not long ago when some blowhard academic, writing in the Atlantic, twisted Cicero’s ancient wisdom to say old people should butt out of politics and tend their daffodils. Cicero, like others before and after, wrote the exact opposite.

Most “ism” epithets are hurtful if not downright dangerous. Ageism is just idiocy. All bodies age, but dementia is not inevitable. And statecraft is not rugby. Jimmy Carter, the most sensible president in my own Biden-long lifetime, remains shiv-sharp in hospice care at 99.

Those old Romans pegged it. Evil leaders get eviler with age, lusting for power and driven by greed. Good ones, free of envy with no more left to prove, serve the people. Nothing matches their experience and respect earned over time. Today, that has never mattered more.

Is Donald Trump more “dynamic” than Biden? Yes, like the mad queen down Alice’s rabbit hole screaming “Off with their heads.” He let Covid kill en masse, torpedoed the economy, savaged truth, pushed China toward potential war, egged on Russia and led a deadly coup d’etat.

A Trump-trashed nation is now symbolized less by that flag atop the Capitol than a viral photo of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert on the House floor, heckling a State of the Union speech like game-park baboons on a Land Rover hood flinging feces at the windshield.

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DRAGUIGNAN, France — My guess is that Donald Trump can’t win again even if he eludes federal prison or the Georgia state pen. Gullibility, greed and apathy have their limits. But consider that Fox “News” debate among eight others lusting after the job.

Here a few ways the world changed because Americans didn’t laugh off a narcissist nutjob who declared in 2016 only he — a very stable genius — could save them from Mexican rapists, Muslim terrorists and European hangers-on by walling out reality:

SORRENTO, Italy — In sunny splendor on an Old-World terrace facing Naples Bay, I sipped Campari and crunched bruschetta drizzled in luscious olive oil. A Fellini fantasy. But out past the beautiful people and a riot of bougainvillea, I fixated on a distant lump of conical rock.

It was why I’d come back yet again to Italy’s iconic volcano. For the reporter in me, Mount Vesuvius is the mother of all metaphors.

The message is clear. “Media” mostly ignores global crises — metaphorical volcanoes — until they are “breaking news.” By then, all anyone can do is try to get out of the way.

What too many people don’t know is killing us.

ANTIBES, France — No train ride I remember beats the Ouagadougou Choo-Choo from Abidjan, the seaside Ivory Coast capital, up through stunning storybook Africa into the color-splashed, spice-scented heart of Burkina Faso.

We lurched to a halt in pitch-dark Sahel desert. No one had mentioned that rains washed out 50 miles of track weeks earlier. Passengers crammed onto a rickety bus, armed only with mosquito spray in case of trouble down the line.

As dawn broke, we bounced down a rutted road laughing, sharing our last food and singing along with Bob Marley to the driver’s boombox: “I shot the sheriff.” That was 1986. The train is fancier now, but I don’t advise taking it — especially if you’re a sheriff.

Upheaval in the Sahel and civil war in Sudan are as significant to the wider world as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the long term, likely more. Why that sounds surprising is the root of the problem. News coverage is largely scattershot and at a distance.

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