I have sympathy neither for Hamas nor for Israeli government. They both brutally kill people. I cried for six million innocent Jews who were tortured and killed by Nazi Germany. I cry for innocent Palestinians who get killed by Israel.
« Penis!
Stop these killings now.
« Penis!
Cohn Bendit speech
“Enough is enough”, too much is too much”. End of Danny the Red’s speech.
Greeted by bored/indifferent silence from most of the other EU parliamentarians. This supine attitude from majority of EU politicos is
not a good lesson for “World’s Largest Democracy”.
Maybe the terrorists in the Gaza Strip should stop firing missiles into Israel. That would go a long way to ending the violence. One of the problems is that the Hamas Government doesn’t control all the terrorist organizations currently operating in the Gaza strip and, for whatever reason, is unable to crack down on them.
maybe someone here will have definitive information…
My understanding is that the latest round of tit for tat started with the Israeli assassination of the Hamas’ chief of security?
how in the hell did you expect Hamas, with actually nothing BUT iranian rocket launchers at their disposal, to respond?
How is this terrorism, any more than repeatedly curbstomping gaza on the part of the Israeli’s is?
A long-winded but passionate article by a rabbi with the same attitude:
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/12349
“We have to move the focus from who did what to whom and how badly should we feel to the more significant question: how do we use this moment to push beyond the usual cacophony of righteous believers in the goodness of their side’s cause so that we can realize that the issue for all humanity is how to put love, kindness and caring for each other and for the earth on our collective agenda, realizing that the human race simply cannot allow itself to be distracted by outrageous and endless vicious nationalist struggles.”
The most annoying thing about the Israel/Palestine tantrum are the media, political mouthpieces and the ignorant public who try to make it an all-or-nothing issue. If you’re not 100% “pro-Israel” (i.e. allowing Israel to commit war crimes with impunity), then you’re an “anti-semite”, “supporter of terrorism” or even a “Nazi”. The idea that both have a right to exist – and that there is enough room for both – is something they are incapable of grasping.
Israel is doing to the Palestinians the exact same things that were done to jews for the past thousand years. That makes Israel’s actions worse than pogroms across Europe, worse than what the catholics did in Spain, worse than Nazi Germany, because the jews and Israel should know better having been the victims of the same crimes.
slc1 #2: That might have something to do with the fact that Israel-Palestine relations are pretty much a small-scale version of White-Native relations in the United States.
Only, the US never tried to pack 1.6 million people, most of them refugees from 1948, into an area smaller than Rhode Island.
The Israel-Palastinian conflict demonstrates that Tit-for-tat is never a winning strategy.
I recall someone recently (can’t remember who) pointing out that there is a lot of blood on a lot of hands in the Israeli-Palastinian conflict. Religion aside, you have a lot of folks, who for imagined or real issues, hate each others’ guts… and who are living almost on each others’ doorsteps. There’s no way this can ever end well.
Viewing the situation as an outsider, it seems to me that the problem is the continuous right-wing-ization of the Israeli government, which is feeding on itself as left-wing Israeli citizens leave the country in fear or disgust. (In contrast, the Palestinian groups have actually gotten more left-wing over the decades.) The only possible ending for this cycle of escalated crazy on the part of the Israeli government is the destruction of the State of Israel. I don’t see how to stop it from outside, and most of the insiders seem to have given up when Rabin was assassinated.
The best we can do from outside is what was proposed with South Africa: stop trading with them, stop selling them weapons, isolate them. I don’t even know how to get that done in the *US*, though, let alone any other country.