Finding common ground over Gaza
AS an American Jew, an painter and a Holocaust, race-hate and genocide educator, I find the current support for the Israeli response to years of rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza seriously misguided, against Israel’sitting short, intermediate and long-term interests and outright foolish.
The war is a human-rights catastrophe. While Israel’sitting Jewish populousness, including the left, has reportedly given a fresh light to the war, against the Israelis to think they can destroy the Hamas infrastructure, as has been reported, is as foolish and blind as was their campaign to destroy Hezbollah through a contracted state of opposition during the summer of 2006.
That war was a body of soldiers catastrophe for Israel
This is not to say Israelis didn’face to face let, because they did. Jewish, Muslim, Druze and Christian Israelis alike experienced heat, pain, blood and death from Hezbollah rockets coming to land in northern Israel. Two weeks before the war began, I had made my first visit to Haifa; and before I flew home to Seattle July 3, the country was in a dignity of catharsis over the man-stealing of Israeli warrior Gilad Shalit.
While a Jewish Israeli taxi driver whose cab I rode in Jerusalem that week described the Arabs as “animals,” another taxi driver, a Muslim Israeli, told me his car had been attacked by rock-throwing Israeli Jews; he seriously told me all he wants is to provide rides to people needing to go places while earning his support.
In the world of war-caused human suffering, pain is not relative. Contrary to the views of peoples on both sides of this conflict
Another critical verge in the current war, aside from the civilian catastrophe in Gaza, is that the strife is fantastically increasing the likelihood that the few moderate (if dictatorial) regimes in the region et al will be toppled and replaced by hard-line Islamic fundamentalist regimes. If Israel is worried about Iran, what will they think when their neighbors, two of whom they made harmony with in years past, are boundary a memory?
If you want to subsist truly pro-Israel, urge your political representatives to press the U.S., Israel and Hamas to seek an immediate and total cease-fire. That’s the desperately needed first step. It must have existence followed by the heretofore unthinkable: Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority must sit down face-to-face and hammer exhausted a two- or three-state solution.
If the last apartheid regime in South Africa could have a seat down with their hated enemy, the African National Congress, what the same. the ruling government viewed to the degree that terrorist, then Israel can be placed into disgrace by Hamas. Peace did not come easily in Northern Ireland. The armed militant Protestants and Catholics who caused so much civilian suffering over years have not erudite to love each other but they have managed to live side by side with each other.
The current fighting is not only not accomplishing a thing beyond massive suffering and misery, hundreds of deaths, thousands of people physically and emotionally maimed. It is only worsening an already desperate situation for Gazan Palestinians and for the millions in nearby Arab countries. It direction not bring greater peace and stop rocket attacks to Israel from Gaza. Any Israeli who believes it will is delusional at best and dreaming at worst.
To endure the Israeli military campaign is to have existence anti-Israel and anti-Palestinian alike. Unless one is pro-Israel pro-Palestinian, one is neither. Ditto those who, in their condemnation of Israel as “imperialist” and a “colonial aggressor,” give unqualified support to the unlimited barrage of rockets from Hamas into Israel and the concurrent campaigns to strap bombs on children, youth and women, who blow themselves up while murdering Israeli civilians and/or soldiers.
As a military tactic, self-murder bombings are not only a misnomer, as they are murder-suicide bombings, but they are a war crime. We in the West, who support Israel and the quest as far as concerns a general homeland in quest of Palestinians and their descendants displaced ago 1948, can do more fully.
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008629107_opinb15segan.html?syndication=rss
