SMRs and AMRs

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Start With Gaza

Roger Cohen, NYT
AUG. 5, 2014

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a ritualistic obscenity. It offends the conscience of humankind. The Oslo accords are dead. The “peace process” initiated through them is a farce. It is time to rethink everything.

In Gaza, an open-air prison for 1.8 million people, more than 300 children are dead, killed in the almost month-long Israeli bombardment. Each of those children has a name, a family. Several were killed in the recent shelling of a United Nations school, an act that the United States called “disgraceful.” The many civilian casualties in Gaza cannot be waved away as the “human shields” of Hamas. They were not human shields; they were human beings. When the guns die down, Israel will begin a difficult accounting.

But, yes, Hamas used these human beings, used them in the sense that the organization has no objective in the real world. Israel, which it says it is bent on annihilating, is not going away. Hamas manipulates and subjugates the Palestinians it governs in the name of a lost cause. To send rockets into Israel is to invite a certain response whose result, over time, is to reinforce a culture of paralyzing Palestinian victimhood. Hamas is criminal. It is criminal in its sacrifice of the Palestinian national cause to a fantasy, in its refusal to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right “to exist in peace and security,” in its determination to kill Jews, and in its willingness to see the blood of its people shed for nothing.

(More here.)

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