Yet again, the IDF will be asked to "exercise restraint" as it crushes the Palestinians. According to Ha'aretz, at least 230 Gazans are dead, with over 700 wounded. We will be told how Palestinians have been firing "indiscriminately" (to use the words of one Zionist spokesman) at Israeli civilians, while both the causes and the effect of those pitiful rocket attacks - most of them with homemade weapons - will not be examined; more people die in American school shootings in a year than have died in seven years of Qassam attacks.
And isn't Hamas being oh-so-dastardly by resuming fire as soon as the ceasefire ended? How this latest chapter began, however, will be entirely forgotten, when Israel imposed an embargo on the territory it had supposedly "disengaged" from because it's silly people used their new democracy to elect the wrong people. "The Arabs will just use their tunnels to re-arm!" was what we heard from zionists who opposed the truce. Obviously, they did, but the tunnels also became a way to keep a million people from starving. Hamas agreed to the calm because they thought it would be a step towards getting the siege lifted. For most zionists, however, openly negotiating with the leading Palestinian party is taboo.
This is just as it was before negotiations with the PLO started in 1991, after the Madrid conference. Before then, Arafat and the PLO were supposedly Public Enemy #1, and numerous operations had been launched to smash the organization, including the IDF's initial invasion of Lebanon. As with people everywhere, Israel needed to see tomorrow's enemy rushing at it before it could bring itself to talk to today's.
After all, why would you want peace with the Palestinians when, at long last, their surrender seems so close?
All of that, however, is history. It's lost on those of us who rely on CNN or CanWest Global for our news. Instead, having launched the last massacre in 2006, having blocked their food and fuel, having abducted them by the thousands, and having taken their homelands by force, Israel will be asked that this time, this time, would it please show some "restraint"?"
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I received this in an e-mail from a local lawyer who is active on these issues. I can't think of a way to describe it. . .
"A Christmas Card from the Children of Bethlehem"
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