Hi, NYCartist! (Thanks for writing!)

No, they make my point, but only sort of. This conversation does have a bit of different feel. These two really seem to want to get at something. Can you feel it? They still bicker, but it is clearly from bitterness; they have lost much.

I understand it too. Yesterday I read people write: Jews are evil. They should die. It was so painful. I wrote back: I am your child's Jewish teacher who watched out for him/her, your neighbor who drags in your lost garbage can, the one who walks your grandmother to her car, etc...

My arms hurt from writing so much, reaching out to so many. All I want to do is grab hands of all these people.

I have to hope that these two were affected by the post, tryed a little harder at understanding and a little less at meanness and finger pointing. I feel that they did.

I called my cousin in Tel Aviv yesterday to check on him, gentle soul that he is. He was sad and frustrated. There is no end. He dislikes it all and chooses to spend time in kindness to all people best he can.

What I wish people would know is how peaceful Israelis and Palestinians are!!! When I was in Israel in summer 2006 (Lebanon and Israeli conflict), a cab driver and I rode the streets together, softly relating, about how much the weather made us want to go to the sea, or something...

How sweet, a Jew and a Palestinian passing the day in conversation, one caring for the other, me with smiles and soft words, him with advice on how to travel...all the while missiles and bombs passing between countries!

People please! Take care of each other better! Listen best you can and keep your heart open! If you are here, writing, I believe that is what you want!!!

Thanks for responding, Hootowl! Please permit me to clarify what it is I am saying and not saying. I am not saying that we sit idly by. What I am saying is that the tone here bears little difference from the tone in the middle east, where people do not listen to eachother well, nor have a discussion to foster understanding and cooperation. That is simply what I am suggesting here. For us to treat one another well, even those who disagree with us, so we can demonstrate how its done. Perhaps when we do this, we can also figure out what we - collectively - can do.

Hamas's actions are not legitimate warfare, but then legitimate warfare can only be waged by sovereign states, which Palestine is not. Palestinians do have the right of resistance, however they do not have the capability to strike military targets with their rockets, which are unguided. As you point out suicide bombers have hit the IDF, but so few. Since Palestine is not a state, it has no military, and no strict command structure..who knows if the individual bombers pick their own targets?

I bet their election was more free than ours are.

"Like when they said that all agreements made by the previous governments were no longer meaningful?"

Didn't Bush do that too, pulling out of treaties left and right? He must've been their inspiration.

And Americans, remember boys and girls we 3 BILLION a year to Israel so they can commit crimes against humanity on our (American citizen here) dime. 5 years of funding Israel would pay to save a million auto workers jobs in the midwest. I went to see a music show last night and a woman was wearing a button that said "Save Michigan" something to think about.

Yes, push a people to sufficient levels of desperation, and it is probably fairly easy to find someone supporting acquiescence.

---USAn---

"We explain the difference in the statistics with the fact that the IDF is better trained and better equiped..." In essence might makes right letto, that was wrong when it was the Nazi philosophy and wrong when Israel does it too. Go back to the drawing board and try again.

In the past, here in the US its been relatively easy to deny Israeli brutality with hand-waving arguments about how the attacks are just "retaliation", that they "minimize" civilian casualties, and that any civilian casualties are "accidental" and merely due to Palestinians using human shields.

In the US media, these arguments are not questioned. However, the first two arguments are largely meaningless. Offenses from the Israeli side never cease, and Palestinian offenses cease only rarely (though sometimes for periods of weeks or months), so every violence from either side could be described as a "response"-- or merely as part of an ongoing tit-for-tat. What does it mean to "minimize" civilian casualties? The minimum number of civilian casualties is ZERO. What precisely is the military necessity that requires some larger minimum number? In what sense is a missile strike on a household of innocent victims an "accident"?

Armed rebels are overwhelmingly young men, and their leaders overwhelmingly somewhat older men, whereas the general population in a country like Palestine is a wee bit over half female, and 30 to 40 % children under 14. Thus, demographics of killing provide a way to tell whether attacks are indiscriminate. Victims of random violence look like the general population, e.g., half female, 1/3 children; attacks on fighters will be biased toward men of fighting age; attacks on leaders will be biased toward older men.

In the past its been obvious that, by this kind of objective yardstick, a victim of Israeli violence is at least as likely to be a random victim as a deliberate target. This is true for the intifadah in general, and in regard to the Israeli assault on Lebanon a few years ago, it was considerably worse for innocent victims. In that conflict, Hezbollah showed more military discipline than the IDF, according to the casualty numbers. And I'm just talking about PROPORTIONS here, not the total numbers. In total numbers, Israel regularly kills far far more civilians than do the Palestinians.

Of course the defenders of Israeli violence have a seemingly endless supply of special reasons why the statistics don't mean what they seem to mean. One of these is the "human shield" argument. Human Rights Watch (HRW) blew this apart after Israel's assault on Lebanon. They concluded that Hezbollah positions were mainly "dug in" positions in rural areas. The innocent non-combatants killed in Lebanon were not human shields but victims of Israeli air strikes. E.g., see this article from the J. Post:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1188392547032

B'Tselem (www.btselem.org) has ongoing numbers of persons killed in Israel and the occupied territories, going back many years.

This isn't special-- neither the pattern of innocent victims nor the denial by imperialists and occupiers. Killing civilians is part of the dynamic of imperialism. US opinion-makers use the same arguments to excuse our violence against innocent Iraqis. Its all part of the great evils of militarism, racism and poverty.

Despite the fact that many progressive people may not agree with the philosophy of Hamas, we see secular and democratic people world wide protesting against what is perceived as "War Crimes Against Humanity" perpetrated by the State of Israel.

One cannot escape the fact that Gaza is the largest OPEN_AIR prison camp in the world. This is really not about Hamas as much as it is about a nation ecomically blockaded and starved. It is a story about the ENSLAVER and the ENSLAVED. The relation between Israel and Palestinians is not one of equality and mutual respect. It is a MASTER SLAVE relationship. Peace cannot be based on such equations.

The State Of Israel needs to address the harsh reality of its history. That it is a nation whose founders and leaders committed a carefully calculated campaign, and crime, of ETHNIC CLEANSING against an indigenous population. The Palestinians are a people who were DISPOSSESSED and DISINHERITED, and brutally and inhumanely so.

As such, people worldwide will continue to speak out against this MASTER SLAVE relationship, and to speak out against injustice. This is not about being for or against HAMAS. It is about one's conscience pushing us to speak out against injustice.

Israel's ability to manipulate Western Media outlets is diminishing. More and more people rely on alternative resources to filter for the truth. Who really violated the ceasefire? Why is that Israel is allowed to blockade and starve another population? Is this not a violation of the ceasefire? How many Palestinians were killed in so-called pre-emptive strikes by the Israelis? And so these are not violations of a cease fire.

What is most promising and encouraging and uplifting is that we are seeing more and more Jews speaking out against Israeli policies of apartheid and war. This is probably the most important and significant development as it bites into Israel's ability to continue to exploit the HOLOCAUST. Israel has been adept at silencing the Christian West by continuous reminder of the West's guilt in the holocaust.

Israel needs to come to terms with itself and its conscience. The Holocaust was not a carte blanche for Israel to do wrong and call it right. With its actions, Israel only fuels rabid and blind anti-semitism against Jews, and trivializes the universal lessons that humanity should have acquired from the Holocaust.