Here are my thoughts about the conflict in Gaza.
I think that it was a big mistake for the Palestinians in Gaza to elect Hamas, but I can understand why they would do it. If your government does absolutely nothing to help advance your needs, you probably would vote the other way, too. My parents changed political parties for this very reason.
Palestinians living in Israel wanted rights. They wanted the ability to work, travel in and out of Jerusalem and its environs without frisking and massive checkpoint delays. They wanted either to become citizens of Israel, or of a sovereign Palestinian State, which so far does not exist. They wanted economic prosperity. They wanted the ability to own a house that was not destroyed merely because of and Israeli Antiquities project - what I call "Political Archeology." Disgusting. Palestinians wanted Israel to actually take a stance against the illegal settlements that radical Jews have been building inside "Palestinian" territory for the past 50 years. Palestinians wanted to be able to travel freely between countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel did nothing to help the Palestinians. The Palestinian government Fatah did nothing to help the Palestinians. They elected Hamas, who, with its radical violent ways of obtaining goals at least promised that it would do SOMETHING to help the Palestinians achieve these goals.
It was a very sad day when Gazans elected Hamas to be their official government. Since then Israel has had strict control of its borders, the U.S. and the U.N. have blocked trade, and Gaza has never known such poverty.
Israel used the rocket attack by Hamas last December as an excuse to go inside and blast as many Palestinian people as they could. You have to understand that Gaza is a super dense urban area. There is no way that Israelis could have launched any attack on Hamas without expecting huge death tolls of Palestinians. This did not stop them. There have even been reports on the BBC of Israeli soldiers rounding up innocent Gazan children and shooting them in a school building.
The "defense" argument is bogus. If I tap you on the shoulder and you respond by dislocating my arm, slicing off all of my fingers, and giving me two black eyes, there is no way you would be able to argue it was "defense". The kinds of rockets that Hamas owns are mainly garage-made, crude instruments that cannot aim at a target with accuracy. Recently, there are accounts of Hamas posessing more advanced weaponry that it smuggled through the tunnels from Egypt to Gaza. Yet there has not yet been evidence of their existence. These rockets hit all the way into Beersheba - but they didn't kill anybody there. Just because Hamas has the ability to hit farther into Israel than it ever has before does not give Israel license to kill as many people as get in their way.
Anyway, I don't understand what the heck Israel is going to gain from inflaming the Palestinian and Arab world except more recruits for Hamas. Israel looks like a bully to the UN, the EU, and, though not as significant, to me.
What gives Israelis the right to control the borders of the Gaza strip, meaning the resources and people who can enter and exit, and not accord the people living there the same rights as Israeli citizens? It's so freaking screwed up that a Jew from Australia could get more rights than a Palestinian living 5 minutes across a wall. And that Israel claims their right to this land based on the Holocaust is just a sick and evil twist.
