re: #86 golgoth

Now hold on a second here.

A second. That’s about your attention span, apparently.

You seem to think the world springs full blown into being over and over again, second by second, that there is no past, no history, no past actions, no consequences stemming from those past actions.

In your world, Israel blockades Gaza just because it wants to, because it’s big and bad and feels like it. In your world, Israel never withdrew from Gaza, leaving the Palestinians with infrastructure, donated state-of-the-art greenhouses, all the raw materials needed to build a thriving economy. In your world, the Palestinians never trashed that infrastructure all by themselves, never elected a gang of terrorist thugs as their leaders, never rained thousands of rockets on Israel, necessitating an armed incursion by Israel to stop the bombardment and protect its citizens. In fact, the moment Israel invaded Gaza, the Hamas missile bombardment vanished from your memory, and Israel was invading just because it’s something that big bad Jews do, dontcha know. In your world, Hamas doesn’t have and never had a charter that rejects a two-state solution and calls for Israel’s destruction.

I wonder if there was or is any other conflict on Earth where you would be so forgetful (I mean, we are talking dementia-level forgetfulness here) about the reasons behind it and the history of it…that these decisions and actions by this side had these consequences, that these decisions and actions by the other side had these consequences, and so on. You may not agree with the firebombing of Dresden or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but you would probably never claim that these things just happened out of the blue, that one fine peaceful day Britain and the U.S. just said, “Hey, let’s kill us a bunch of Germans and Japanese!” and proceeded to spend billions developing and building bombers, fighter planes, bombs, and atomic warheads to do the dirty deed, while the unsuspecting Germans frolicked in the foothills of the Alps and the Japanese wrote each other love poems.

Yet this is precisely what you do in the case of the Israel/Hamas conflict. Israel doesn’t allow certain things into Gaza…why? All the history behind this decision, all the reasons, the facts, simply vanish from your mind, become invisible to you. It’s quite remarkable really.