re: #1 ComradeDread

Hyperbole much?

To start with I’m not going to give you an account of middle-eastern history and American politics from 1948 to the present day to explain why America is on Israels side in this (not to mention the religious aspect for many Americans). You seem to have a brain, use it, do some research on the subject.

Israel has not “bombed Gaza back to the stone age” nor has it killed non-combatants indiscriminately. The Palestinian dead number around 1650 with no reliable numbers of any kind on how many of those were Hamas fighters and how many were civilian casualties.

There are just over 1.8 million Palestinians living within the 139 sq. miles of the Gaza strip so in non-partisan, non-political, non-hyperbolic reality the death toll is surprisingly small. That isn’t meant to be callous, it isn’t like I’m simply shrugging my shoulders and saying that each life lost doesn’t matter. It is simply a statement of fact when you consider the amount of ordinance exchanged between the combatants and Israel’s ground forces incursion into Gaza.

Perhaps you have forgotten the death tolls (or are too young to remember) associated with previous clashes between Israel and the Palestinians? America has actually helped there, perhaps you might not see it that way, but it really has. A lot of that latest generation military tech that the Israelis are using was either supplied or partially funded by us while Israel developed it themselves. The death toll would have been much higher if Israel hadn’t been trying hard to avoid civilian casualties and didn’t have weapons that (mostly) allowed it to do so.

Your also ignoring that Hamas was purposefully storing rockets and launching rockets at Israel from densely populated areas and in places that violated the Geneva conventions. Either they wanted civilian casualties that they could blame on Israel or they gambled (and lost) that Israel would withhold their fire and allow Hamas to continue launching rather than face the bad P.R. in the press.

Lift the siege? With Hamas still in control of the Gaza strip? The people whose charter calls for the extermination of Israel? Sorry but that is tantamount to calling for Israel to just commit mass suicide so as to get out of Hamas’ way faster. You are aware of how many arms shipments from Qatar, Iran, and even North Korea headed for Hamas have been intercepted in the last decade or so, right?

I understand, to you it is all just about big bully Israel beating up on poor defenseless Palestine, it is what you think you know to be the truth. All I can say (again) is do some research that goes beyond just clicking on the first link at the top of the search results page. Don’t go to partisan sites with easy simplistic answers, study the factual history of this conflict.

Maybe then you can come back here and make some type of suggestion that actually makes sense. ;)