Dear Bernie,

The 7th of October could not have happened under normal circumstances while the IDF was standing on guard. An abnormal number of simultaneous "mishaps" was required to allow Hamas troops into Israel and delay Israel's response, including even the airforce being misled, the intelligence and observers ignored and 99% of the army diverted and alert on the Lebanese border, leaving the Gazan front deserted - and I don't think it was just a coincidence.

«As long as Hamas is the government in power in Gaza and while maintaining its goal of destroying Israel and presumably killing any Jews»

Hamas can only be in government if it is supported by the local people.
To have peace and not just a temporary cease-fire, Israel should win the hearts of the people, and it can, at least a different government could, which believed them to be human too. Shooting at them and destroying their homes is not quite in that direction.

«with Hamas happy to see its civilians killed»

Exactly - if Israel could only convince the population that kicking out Hamas is more important than destroying Israel. It might not be a big love affair but if the ordinary people at least learnt that Israel cared a little more about them than Hamas does. After all, suppose Hamas was successful and Israel destroyed, then these poor people would have had to live under Hamas forever.

Otherwise, Hamas may no longer be there, but a similar group would take over under a different name.

«in order to have people like you put pressure on Israel to stop defending itself.»

Israel has long completed the phase of defending itself, which lasted some month or two or three and I supported that phase at the time. Israel's government has now gone instead (for domestic political purposes) into a spree of blind thoughtless and also ineffective revenge, which I do not support.

Most everything here is out of date.
Hamas has been depleted significantly and the partial vacuum
so generated has been filled with tribal groups looking after their
own patches. They owe nothing to Hamas only to their own district.
This must complicate things for the Israelis.
It is early days yet but they have hoovered up a lot of Hamas arms.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is terrible, and the death toll is shocking, but it isn’t genocide. Genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. If Israel wanted to destroy the people of Gaza the death toll would be far, far higher.

Alon asks a series of rhetorical questions that deserve answers:

“how do you explain the deaths of nearly 54,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women, children, and the elderly?” Actually by the standards of recent conflicts these numbers are not especially high (http://www.britannica.com/list/8-deadliest-wars-of-the-21st-century). About half of Gaza’s population are children and half of the rest are women, so a conflict with a high proportion of civilian casualties will have a high proportion of women and children among them. And there are many civilian casualties because Hamas hides its personnel, arms and equipment in residential areas and in or under civilian infrastructure such as mosques and hospitals. This habit of using civilians and civilian infrastructure as human shields also answers Alon’s second question: “How do you define the deliberate destruction of hospitals, clinics, schools, and whole neighborhoods with thousands buried under the rubble, left to rot?”

Alon asks, “How do you describe the many Israeli soldiers who boast about the number of Palestinians they have killed?” This is despicable, but I suspect that some combatants in pretty much every war in history have done the same.

It may indeed be that Israel has lost its Jewish values, and will never be the same. I hope not. But Hamas apparently remains true to its genocidal Islamofascist values; and that has been for years, and remains, the prime reason for the suffering of Gazans.

Here is the song sheet prized by the author and Yuyutsu. http://www.972mag.com/

This nasty little rag will ultimately be sponsored by Qatar, the true sponsors of Hamas, not Netanyahu, or the CIA, the security arm if the US Democrats, in their relentless campaigns of disinformation against any Democracy not Leftist; especially Israel.

Dear Rhian,

«If Israel wanted to destroy the people of Gaza the death toll would be far, far higher»

But one cannot speak of Israel as a single "wanting" agent: Israel is deeply divided and different Israelis want different things.

Members of the Nazi party in Israel's coalition government - well sure, if they had free reign then they would immediately spray Gaza with sarin gas, killing all including inside the tunnels (because sarin is heavier than air). Then they would proceed to kill all Israeli Arabs as well as any Jew who ever befriended them, then finally kill all Jews who fail to observe Jewish Halachic law.

But Netanyahu himself is neither a Nazi nor genocidal, just a weak opportunistic petty criminal who does not care this way or the other how many get killed, including Israeli hostages and soldiers - all he cares is for his own skin and for his immediate family. As he needs to keep the war going on indefinitely to avoid a royal commission, for him it is best to kill the Gazans SLOWLY - enough to satisfy his Nazi coalition partners, but not finish that human fuel too quickly.

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Dear Dan,

Thank you for the link, very interesting, resourceful and sad.

- Make Israel Moral Again!

Alon is correct in his belief that genocide is happening in Gaza. The far right Zionists that now control Israel are intent of ethnically cleaning all Palestinian territories, and incorporating those lands into Israel. The Zionist cheer squad here and elsewhere are rather predictable in their denial of what is blatantly obvious.