Bombs

In Israel's concentration camp, they are using bombers.

They are not fighting Hamas. Let's be clear. That is not the intention here. The intention is to reduce the will of the Palestinian people to support Hamas (or worse, to provoke all-out war between the Palestinians and Israel). Israel's aim is, as it has been for many years, to enfeeble the Palestinian people to the point at which they will accept a settlement that allows Israel what it wants: all the best land, all of Jerusalem, all the water.

All the hope.

We should not support cryptofascists just because they hold elections (we did not, one should note, support the legitimate winners of free and fair elections in Palestine). And what else are people who believe their right to an ethnic state justifies murdering unarmed people? What else is a state that uses racism to deny justice?

Now Israel is likely to invade Gaza again. But to what end? Israel will never have security while it refuses to give justice. Its bleating about how Iran -- a nation that has not attacked its neighbours -- is a vicious monster will remain meaningless while it continues to murder civilians, as it has in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and if it is not restrained, in Iran. And why should Iran not want it gone? Here is the question that the West will not answer. Why would a Muslim nation not want a regime that murders Muslims because they are Muslims gone?

It's easy to -- and I expect to be seeing at least one commenter do it -- claim that Israel is just responding to Hamas missile strikes. But that is given the lie by the targets of Israel's bombs: people not rockets. It's as clear a falsehood as the suggestion that America attacked Iraq to punish those responsible for 9/11. Each hopes to use the sympathy for their victimhood in a crime as cover for its own much greater crime. We should not pretend to accept the cover story, and even though we condemn the crime they have suffered -- and I do not condone Hamas' attacks on Israeli civilians -- we should not permit it to be the excuse for much worse.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:00 am