You have an interesting point, Imajulianutter, about militarising children to protect stolen land - however, conscription in Israel, evil as it is, did not start in 1967, but was there since Israel's inception, in 1948.

Some kids are perverts indeed, but that's not the norm. The majority of Israeli children, likely including Gilad and Malki, hold no dreams of the kind you mentioned - they would rather commence higher education at the age of 18, or have fun, or support their family, but they cannot, they are victims and go to the army only because the other options are to go to jail or to break a leg.

The problem is that people like Tamimi make no distinction and are happy to kill all Israeli children indiscriminately.

This has to be one of the most warped discussions of morality I’ve ever come across! What sort of twisted morality demands that murderers be released from prison and tries to justify terrorism on the grounds of ‘why’ they did it? If someone had blown up a peak-hour bus in Melbourne or Sydney, no matter how sympathetic their cause may have been, would you be suggesting they should be released from prison? Would you be defending someone who’d walked into a restaurant and opened fire on the diners if they’d called themselves a ‘freedom fighter’ against the white ‘occupation’ of Australia? It shouldn’t matter what your political stance is regarding the Middle East – any person with any moral fibre should be appalled that even one murderer has had to be released from prison to secure the release of a hostage. If you cannot tell right from wrong in such clear-cut cases of murder, what hope is there of you telling right from wrong when things are a little more grey?!

When addressing questions of morality one usually turns to our religious leaders. In this case of this article it is hard to ignore the echo of Rabbi Yaacov Perrin's words “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail”. It was uttered at the funeral in Israel of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli terrorist responsible for slaughtering 29 Muslims while they were at prayer and wounding another 125.

Most of us outside this conflict would see deep flaws with describing the latest prisoner swap as a moral decision, especially given the brutality on both sides, yet we can understand why the authors, given their obviously deep connections to the issue would view it in such a singular fashion.

For an outsider the stark omission in the article is the mention of the Israeli pledge to 'never leave a soldier behind'. The government obviously recognises, even if the authors do not, the power of this pledge as a morale boosting, unifying ethic within the IDF. This is especially important given the odious work of occupying and subjugating a people. It is difficult not to see a calculation having been made that the empowering of the enemy through this deal was to a large measure annulled by re-empowering its military.

One can only view with utter disgust the Sbarro pizza restaurant bombing mentioned in the article. The location and most particularly the time of day was designed purely to target families. A poster asked why was it done and while it is understandable that many Jewish people would find this question insulting I feel for the rest of us it is an appropriate response.

From my reading it would appear the attack was in response to a missile strike on the Hamas Ministry of Information building a month earlier. It targeted Jamal Mansour who was a Hamas spokesperson whose primary role within the organisation was responsibility for information and public relations. Eight civilians including two children aged 8 and 10 were killed in the attack.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/mansour.html

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What is unfathomable to the rest of us is why, knowing the anguish of losing children to the enemy why you would then go and target them. What is equally disturbing to an outsider was the glorification of the Sbarro Pizza shop bombing by students at the West Bank An-Najah Univeristy where in the one year celebration of the Second Intifada “The exhibit’s main attraction was a room-sized re-enactment of the bombing at Sbarro. The installation featured broken furniture splattered with fake blood and human body parts. To his credit Yasser Arafat acted to shut it down though one wonders why the teachers allowed it to go up in the first place.

One wonders too at the comments of Samuel Hacohen, a teacher at a Jerusalem college, who declared the terrorist Baruch Goldstein the "greatest Jew alive, not in one way but in every way" and said that he was "the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect.". One must also credit the Israeli government for eventually shutting down the shrine at his grave site. It that had become a place of pilgrimage for thousands of Jews, some of whom who danced and sang in celebration of his deeds.

While the selective sense of morality from both sides, including the authors of this article, is in many ways understandable I think it is the duty of the rest of us to take a wider view and not get caught up in the hatreds, recriminations and rhetoric of the issue, amply illustrated by some of the posts here, since it is obvious that without us this will never be solved.

As a slight aside any discussion of moral fibre should include the appalling decision of Australia to vote against Palestine becoming a member of UNESCO. We were one of the few nations who did so and we should be ashamed.

To Yuyutsu and Montgomery can I point out that I did not try to justify the bombing of a pizza parlor.
But I repeat, why did Ahlam Tamimi do what she did?
Unless we ask that question and listen to the answer, we are condemning ourselves and our children to doing it all again someday.

Great comments Montgomery! I also have no time for people who try to justify murder. Also, I am rather puzzled by Yuyutsu's strange comments about Israeli conscription. Children are not being conscripted in Israel. They are conscripted at the age of 18, no different to many other countries. Yuyutsu may be also interested to learn that conscription exists in Algeria, Angola, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Greece, Iran, North and South Korea, Russia, Kuwait, Singapore and Turkey, amongst others.
Perhaps Israelis and Palestinians suffer from the same disease: They cannot see each other as equal human beings. I suppose that this is often consequence of war, especially in such a chronic conflict. Its upto us as outsiders not to see this conflict as 2-dimensional.