re: #511 Charles

My intention isn’t exactly to “take sides” in a tangly conflict. But hasn’t the entire last decade involved a push by the United States for “democracy”? Is the principle in fact “free elections are good, but if people vote in ways we dislike, we will blockade them and starve their innocent women and children to death”? Why not just impose military dictatorships over all the areas in the world in which the civilian populations hold views we dislike?

A civilian population voting a “terrorist government” into power should be also seen in context — Israel rejects in practice even the moderate “road map” plans that the U.S. has proposed in recent years, and under the extreme-rightist Netanyahu government (which includes lunatic religious fundamentalists who are just as insane and dangerous as the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists often attacked on this site, and also includes overt Jewish racists whose political parties are directly descended from the openly fascist early “revisionist Zionists”) has escalated its international crimes by expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank. No one in the world, not even the U.S., accepts these areas as party of Israel’s sovereign territory. Israel is now setting in place a plan in the West Bank in which only Jewish settlers are given access to the main paved roads, so that they can easily drive back and forth between Israel proper and their illegal settlements (making such illegal settlements more desirable places to live). Such acts compound the situation further and don’t exactly make Israel look like a reasonable actor interested in peace. Hamas has clearly committed a number of abhorrent acts, but so has Israel — if the Israelis show no sign of respecting international law, and show no sign of even listening to their closest allies’ pleas for moderation, why should we be surprised that the Gazans respond to aggression with further aggression?

Israel has shown no real sign of moderating their own position. The Arab states as early as the mid 70s had proposed essentially the same peace deal that all world powers support today, which would see Israel return to its 1967 borders. Hamas presently publicly accepts in premise such a solution but Israel does not, and that at least displays something.