Ask yourself two simple questions:

Who is holding the hostages?

Who is hiding behind Gazan civilians?

...Are we clear now? Yes? See, it was easy! And no need to refer to the thoroughly discredited Hamas ministries.

Should I bring up billions in humanitarian aid for decades which never went to the Palestinians in Gaza, their well-being or their security and instead went into funding terrorism?

Should I bring up the militant Islamism of Hamas that denies the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state?

Should I bring up the intra-Palestinian state of warfare between Hamas and PA that has been going on since 2007?

Should I bring up the Sunni/Shia regional confrontation which has been going on for centuries and which fuels today's proxy terrorism which serves one side or the other?

You see, just because I don't mention something which would be out of context in the cartoonishly simplistic discourse on Israel we are having here, doesn't mean I am missing anything.

And, speaking of the overly simplistic context, you don't think that taking hostages and using civilians to hide behind is a good thing, do you?

Israel holds thousands of hostages in jails.

Israel has been accused of genocide.

Israeli soldiers commit war crimes daily.

Israel occupies land illegally and builds illegal settlements.

Netanyahu is a wanted war criminal.

Israel should be a pariah state, Free Palestine and join BDS.

Wear your keffiyah with pride.

Free Palestine.

"Israel holds thousands of hostages in jails."
- Only if you don't know the difference between hostages and prisoners. Tell me you do.

"Israel has been accused of genocide."
- So has Biden. And your point is?

"Israeli soldiers commit war crimes daily."
- No they don't.

"Israel occupies land illegally and builds illegal settlements."
- Neither is terrorism.

"Netanyahu is a wanted war criminal."
- No he is not. He is suspected of war crimes, and they don't include terrorism.

"Israel should be a pariah state, Free Palestine and join BDS."
- Thanks for offering an opinion. I have one too.

"Wear your keffiyah with pride".
- But first, if you want to show off your pride, learn how to spell "keffiyeh" correctly.

Free Palestine.
- Which one? A Roman province or a former Ottoman territory under British mandate?

Stop blaming each other .....look for a way to resolve the conflict together .
Do something positive apart from defending the indefensible on both sides .

Who Are The Terrorists?

Both sides are the Terrorists .

Israel Turned a Justified War of Defense Into an Unjustifiable Campaign of Killing

Likud lawmaker Moshe Saada was interviewed on the Haredi radio station Kol Barama, saying that he has no problem with children in Gaza dying. "The only way to restore security is to continue the siege on Gaza. Our mistake is that we haven't done this so far." Saada is ostensibly a reasonable person, a jurist who worked in the Justice Ministry's department of internal police investigations, a man of faith. However, the notion of starving Gaza has long become a prevalent one, not only in the Kahanist-ultranationalist religious part of the political spectrum.

Retired major general and former head of Israel's National Security Council Giora Eiland embraced this idea and, along with some other retired generals, formed a plan dubbed the "generals' plan." Eiland and his friends looked at international law and at military history and found that it is legal and legitimate to strangle and smother an entire region. They label this a "siege." Its current implementation on the ground is officially denied, but meanwhile, children in Gaza are dying and freezing in rain-flooded tents.

The muses also have their say. Singer Avraham Tal explained in an interview that he believes that "not all the sons of Abraham have to fill this land…they have been brainwashed for generations to hate us…history repeats itself. Once, the Crusaders committed atrocities, now it's the Muslims."

Tal apparently thinks that now it's our turn. "We have to protect ourselves as a Jewish state. Listen, if a three-year-old there starts getting a good education, there is some hope, but it's a slim one…wiping out a people is not Judaism. But we have to eliminate Hamas, including anyone involved with it. It appears that it's everybody there." I didn't quite understand what Judaism is: Is it all of them or not? Do we have to wipe them all out or not?

The Hottest Place in Hell website reported, and the IDF confirmed, that a Nahal Brigade commander shot and killed a Palestinian who was assisting Israeli military forces in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. In this incident, the Palestinian was forced to serve as a human shield, namely, to enter suspicious buildings so that he would be blown up if they were booby-trapped. The commander, who wasn't aware of the conditions of the man's employment, saw him with the soldiers and executed him. So many layers of cruelty and loss of humanity. How low have we sunk?

It's not only the ground forces and not just units commanded by people who have replaced the army's sword and olive branch insignia with a badge showing the crown of the messiah. The air force is incessantly pulverizing what remains of Gaza, with more and more "airstrikes" and "terrorist targets." The pilots carry out these strikes, their commanders give approval, and jurists give it legitimization.

The automatic killing zone bisecting the Gaza Strip is called the "Netzarim corridor." But Netzarim was a tiny Jewish settlement [before it was evacuated in 2005] yet the corridor is miles wide. Was there ever a corridor as wide as a city? They also use a whitewashed term taken from scientific jargon, calling it a "perimeter." They are trying to create one in Lebanon and the Golan Heights as well. I have received a video showing soldiers bringing a Torah scroll, singing and dancing, into a Syrian outpost the Israel Defense Forces took over. In the kibbutz of Hanita, the first of the Tower and Stockade settlements established in pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine, there was a founding convention of wackos dreaming of settling in the Lebanese town of Marjayoun.

For 15 months, Israel has been held captive, subjugated. What began as a terrible trauma and a justified war of defense turned into a campaign of killing and revenge that has no end. How does this contribute to the security of the state and its citizens? The loss of one's humanity, the devaluation of human life and the dehumanization of the Arab carries a heavy internal price, not because of the court in The Hague, but because of the sacrifice of hostages and soldiers, and because of what we have become.

The soul-searching and moral dilemmas of earlier generations appear as a distant twilight illusion, one that has been forgotten. These were expressed by poets and novelists such as Alterman, S. Yizhar, Amos Oz, David Grossman, as well as by generals such as Amram Mitzna and Eli Geva on the eve of entering Beirut in the first Lebanon war. This is the total victory of the enemies of "Israeliness," from the dead Sinwar and Nasrallah to radical right-wing politician Smotrich, who explained this week that "the towns of Nablus, al-Funduq and Jenin [in the West Bank] must look like Jabalya."

Now we have become Hamas.

Source : Haaretz

Link : https://archive.md/gMdGI#selection-1353.0-1357.142