You hear over and over and over again that Hamas broke the cease-fire. For example, Eliot Engel's shameful performance on Al-Jazeera yesterday. Let's counter that bit of propaganda.

It's an interesting fact about this conflict that citizens of the United States are much more propagandized about Israeli innocence/morality than Israelis are. A good example is the idea that Hamas broke the cease-fire with rocket launches. This is patently false. Israel broke it by bombing tunnels. You could argue that they had the right or that it was a good thing to do, but it's simply false to say that it did not break the cease-fire.

From the Jerusalem Post: "Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that while Israel wanted to continue the truce, it could not tolerate tunnel digging... When Israel agreed to the truce it didn't agree that while there was calm, Hamas would exploit it to dig tunnels, whether they are for smuggling weapons, for perpetrating attacks or kidnapping soldiers," she said. "Therefore, if it becomes clear that is what's happening, it is the government's responsibility to act.""

In other words, Israel broke the cease-fire because they didn't like something that was happening.

The Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz was a little more blunt about it: "Palestinians have fired more than 200 rockets on Israel since the Gaza border region flared up November 4, after six Hamas operatives were killed when the Israel Defense Forces destroyed a tunnel near the border."

In other words, the Hamas rocket attacks happened AFTER the IDF air attack.

From the online version of Yedioth Ahronoth, the biggest newspaper in Israel: For the first time since the ceasefire took effect in June, IDF forces operated deep in the Gaza Strip Tuesday night in a bid to collapse a tunnel located 250 meters (273 yards) from the border – and which terror groups intended to use for kidnapping Israeli soldiers."

The IDF goes on to say that they called a temporary "Time-Out" of the cease-fire, and that these bombs didn't count:

"The IDF is committed to maintaining the ceasefire and is acting accordingly," Ynet was told. "In this case, we had a credible threat indicating soldiers might be kidnapped and we had no choice but to act in order to thwart it."
 
As for the chances of the operation effectively ending the ceasefire, the sources said that while that was taken into consideration, the defense establishment believed the chances of that happening were slim but that risking a kidnapping attempt "was not an option."

To be honest, I get annoyed when people quibble about who started what in the latest acts of violence. At some level, it doesn't really matter. Israel needs to get back to its borders or there will never be peace. But the notion that Hamas broke the most recent cease-fire is utterly false.

Alas, both Israel and the United States are genocidal monsters. Can either have a future?

Now Lebanon is starting to fire rockets. Israel may get more here than they bargained for. No doubt they made many more enemies with their last incursion into Lebanon. Violence breeding more violence with no end in sight.

Ursa,
It seems that lifting the blockade is whats preventing Ceasefire negotiations. Why can't the Palestinians have there own state?

I admire Carter for his involvement. But there are reports that this Israel's attasks were planned many months ago, well before the cease-fire was broken - by, as Carter states, by Isreal.

Sorry, but unlike Carter I hsve zero confidence that Israel is capable of negotiating in good faith.

---USAn---

Those pesky Palestinians just won't let Israel forget that they stole their land. The rag heads should stop making trouble, go away, or curl up and die. Then Israelis could get down to the business of having a nice middle class life without all this fuss. How dare Carter go against accepted American wisdom and encourage terrorists when it's well known that Israel can do no wrong!

What does Israel Really want? What map are they following?

Sixty years now. Subsidized by America whose politicians & purse-strings they control. While we have NO health care they have FULL medical and dental for all! Nice homes once owned by Palestinians and nice new ones, built and under construction in the West Bank as I type.

So more of the same must sound great. AND THEY SEE PEACE W/ THE PALESTINIANS AS COMPROMISING THEIR STANDARD OF LIVING-LIKE CHILDREN THAT DON'T WANT TO SHARE..it is only OUR LAND NONE FOR YOU......Because on every front, at every turn, Israel the Colonizer, the Occupier has chosen death and misery for it's victims with never, never, never a reprieve.

By comparison Apartheid in South Africa was humanitarian, I don't recall tanks and helicopter gunships declaring "War" on Soweto.

Signed, an appalled friend of people of All faiths.

Oh, you're talking about the war in Gaza. I thought for a moment there that you had finally woken up and we're talking about the repulsive American assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan, which really are unnecessary wars. But I guess it's easier to criticize other countries than to confront the infinitely worse evil in your own. Time for you to retire and yet people who know what they're talking about deal with the situation.

If you want sonething interesting to ponder, go to the website of Tom Tomorrow (he draws the weekly comic, "This Modern World") and look at the picture of the 5 living Presidents. Obama with both Bushes on either side and Clinton next to Dubya are all close together with Jimmy Carter significantly apart from, though still included in, the picture.

http://www.thismodernworld.com/

To me the picture is metaphoric and shows what happens to anyone (even a former president who has distinguished himself for the past 28 years since leaving the White House as a statesman respected throughout the world, who dares to deviate from the enforced and insane orthodoxy of US mideast policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

My bet is that when they all die (which they all, of course, will) that there will only be genuine mourning among Muslims for one of them--Jimmy Carter. I'll even further wager that even the Iranians will mourn Jimmy's passing. That's because their memories are sharper and more connected to reality than our own. Jimmy Carter, is a true mensch* in a world with fewer and fewer of such people of either gender.

* mensch-Yiddish, from Middle High German mensch, from Old High German mennisco--a person of integrity and honor.

Poet

You mean the occupation of Gaza.
The Palestinians have no tanks or helicopters.
If Israel considers it a war then they are very weak indeed.
Hezbollah would give them a war but you notice Israel isnt taking the bait.

The reason the Israeli press is freer should be obvious. Many Israelis dont give a damn how many Palestinians/non jews are killed.
So the truth can be reported.
But not so in the US where you have anti-arab sentiments but it may not be as monolithic as in Israel with its jews first policies.

Warprofiteers find "necessity" for all wars ...

Until we uninvent the dollar bill, that will be true --

Or until all men are honest men ...

"According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"

In as much as I do deeply respect and admire Jimmy Carter, it seems he does not truly see Israel for what it is, or at least has become. This is the largest, most dangerous, and well financed terrorist organization on the planet. It has a lengthy well documented track record of mass murder and brutality and an established pattern of waging this brutality against defenseless civilians.

The international community repeatedly tried conciliatory, diplomatic, and even appeasement approaches with Hitler early on in his quest for world domination, and it took a while, but they did finally realize that such efforts could not possibly work with such a man -- they never work with criminally insane individuals bent on conquest through brute force.

They will not work with Israel.

Jimmy Carter's presidency is seen as a failure by the media brainwashed and its conservative establishment, and Reagan's as a success. The oligarchy has the final word. Even Jimmy Carter seems to trust them.

Jimmy Carter writes near the end of this illuminating insider piece "The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate supply of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians......"

Is this perhaps in the nature of a Freudian slip?

I was unaware that the United States of America was a direct combatant in the recently opened Gaza theatre of the wider Middle East War, or the global war on terror.

Since when is it the prerogative of the United States to accept or reject cease-fire terms negotiated between Israel and Hamas?

Bill from Saginaw

I have been thinking about Manhattan and Gaza, the similarities. It is one of the ways I build empathy. I just confirmed (via wiki answers)that there are almost the same number of people living in Manhattan, NYC and Gaza. Gaza is surrounded by blockade. Manhattan is surrounded by water. I shall break my rule of only speaking of Sept. 11 once a year, to say that on Sept. 11, 2001, we learned, really learned, how Manhattan is an island. All subway, bridges were closed except to foot traffic (and I suppose,wheelchairs). Tunnels were shut down. I can imagine how it would be if Manhattan didn't get food, like Gaza can't get food. I know the smell and smoke from a building burning....We have high rise apartment buildings in Manhattan and Gaza. We must stop the war on Gaza.

"The invasion of Gaza: what does it mean? – Part One" By Alan Woods http://www.marxist.com/invasion-gaza-what-it-means-1.htm

HELP GAZA - Charities

KinderUSA
http://www.kinderusa.org

American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)
http://www.anera.org

Friends of UNRWA
http://www.friendsunrwa.org

Christian Aid
http://www.christianaid.org.uk

Islamic Relief
http://www.islamic-relief.com

Poet -

I decline to bite on your sucker bet. Damn right the Iranians will mourn Jimmy Carter's passing.

Jimmy Carter lost his re-election contest against Ronald Reagan and became a one term ex-President primarily because of the Iranian hostage crisis. Bill Casey (Reagan's election campaign manager, and subsequent head of the Central Intelligence Agency) successfully outbid the incumbent Carter administration in a sequence of super secret, contorted, back channel negotiations with the mullahs of Tehran, offers and counteroffers of swaps of money and military hardware which eventually determined the timing of the release of the American embassy hostages.

Release before the election worked better for Carter. Release after the election worked better for Ronnie. It was not by magic that within moments of Ronald Reagan's inaugeration, the American hostages were set free.

If you don't believe this history, go ask Robert Gates our holdover Secretary of Defense. He was there, on the Reagan camp team as a junior CIA functionary helping out Bill Casey, when the bidding took place and the deal was struck.

In much the same manner that a 5-4 vote on the US Supreme Court determined the outcome of the 2000 Bush/Gore presidential race, the Ayatollah Khomanie had the final say between the old Great Satan Jimmy Carter or the new Great Satan Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Iranians chose the devil they didn't know, and lived to long regret it.

One of the things I most admire about former president Jimmy Carter is the silence he has kept about this skullduggery (and the complicity of a faction of his own national intelligence bureaucracy in facilitating it) for nearly three decades now. When the old peanut farmer eventually does shuck off his earthly coils, he rightly should be mourned not only by Iranians, Muslims, and Americans generally, but by everybody attuned to the cause of peace and global human rights.

As a former president, a private citizen, and through the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter has helped successfully broker dozens of tense international diplomatic tangles. Carter ventures back into the partisan trenches only sporadically, always to speak his mind on matters of substance and then return to private, nonprofit good works. On the eve of shock & awe, he authored a major op-ed published by the NY Times against the invasion of Iraq, for instance. Glad he's working behind the scenes on Gaza.

I do not expect George W. Bush, from his self-styled new Freedom Center in Dallas, Texas, to emulate Jimmy Carter on the world stage as our soon to be next ex-President. There's food for thought here.

Bill from Saginaw

Maybe it's just a facet of "The Carter Doctrine", Jimmy, me boy. And remember, you & Sadat secured Israel's southern border, so they could strike north into Lebanon easily. Go make some peanut butter.