Don,

If only the people who replied to your latest post could see past their prejudices and locked in views and applaud you instead of denigrating you for the considered alternatives you put forward, this would be a much more helpful debate.

Don, the problems don't go back hundreds or thousands of years. The problems go back to the founding of Israel. Israel was created according to international law but Palestine not.

There are exceptions of couse but in the ME and North Africa Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed for thousands of years. Jews were forced to leave those countries after the creation of Israel when the mood turned decisively against them. The mood is now turning against Christians too.

One of the Israel lobby's greatest strategies is to complicate and obsfuscate. As if it's just too hard for normal people to understand.

It's not. Normal people can see very cleary that whats happening in Gaza is an atrocity. Next time you pass your local primary school and see the kids out on the playgrounds imagine over 300 children killed in Gaza. Would that be the enitre school?

When the schools re-open in Gaza imagine the first day back as children discover who survived and which of their friends were killed.

That is not complicated. That is inexcusable suffering.

Dear Don;

You have made this point twice;

“But in any case, I do not know the ins and outs off the current imbroglio, and accept that you see things differently.”

And

“I see where you come from, and while it is not my view of things, I accept that it is right for you.”

Normally I would view such sentiments as gracious and respectful of a difference in opinion. My apologies but in this situation I can not because in good conscience it would be impossible to return them.

Saying 'while it is not my view of things, I accept that it is right for you' is not in any manner acceptable. It can't be. What has happened to 1800 Palestinians, the vast number who were civilians, does not allow it.

You make an effort at expressing a degree equivalence between the parties in the latest conflict, attempting to back it with a history lesson, but then you only really condemn Hamas. The death and misery wrought on this beleaguered people was so out of proportion to any perceived wrongdoing on their behalf as to be an affront to any even half empathetic human being. In that light I call on the historian in you to put down the books and let the human in you to judge this latest conflict for what it is, a completely unjust tragedy inflicted on an oppressed people.

The historian in me points out that more than 11,000 rockets have been fired into Israel since 2001, that the naval blockade is there to try to prevent the stock being added to, that the main victims of the rocket attacks have been children, and that the threat of a rocket attack has caused great stress and terror to children. No equivalent action occurs from the West Bank, where people have lived comparatively normal lives.

The human in me wonders at the morality of the men who launch their rockets from the neighbourhoods of schools and hospitals. The outcome in time must be death and destruction to one's own people. Hamas believes that 'the Zionist entity' (one doesn't refer to the name of the state because that gives it respectability) must be destroyed.

The human in me says that such people have a twisted morality.

Don Aitkin,

"The historian in me points out that more than 11,000 rockets have been fired into Israel since 2001..."

Killing 28 people in that time.

Which points more to the desperation of people dispossessed and cornered, relying on crude technology for their retaliatory aggression.

And what about the points made by SteeleRedux, the Rabbi and others, such as:

"That belief began to wane in the past eight years when Israel, faced with a Palestinian Authority that promoted nonviolence and sought reconciliation and peace, ignored the Saudi Arabian-led peace initiative that would have granted Israel the recognition that it had long sought, an end to hostilities, and a recognized place in the Middle East, refused to stop its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and imposed an economically crushing blockade on Gaza. Even Hamas, whose hateful charter called for Israel’s destruction, had decided to accept the reality of Israel’s existence, and while unable to embrace its “right” to exist, nevertheless agreed to reconcile with the Palestinian Authority and in that context live within the terms that the PA would negotiate with Israel."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/opinion/gaza-and-israel-the-road-to-war-paved-by-the-west.html?_r=0

"Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world."

We shouldn't dismiss the force of Israeli provocation in creating an entity like Hamas.

Nor should we accept the wanton brutality and barbarity of a modern, technologically superior country cornering civilians and slaughtering them for "retaliation".

Those who see Israel only as the aggressor should take a clearer look at what really has been happening. You have been sucked in by Hamas's propaganda. Their clear and stated aim is to eradicate Israel in whatever way they can. They use their own people as shields; they use material which was destined for homes and schools and hospitals for tunnel fortresses from which they intended to send hundreds of people in to murder Israelis, any Israelis. Read something other than the propaganda that you obviously have been reading/