And that is your fantasy, that Israel's killing of Palestinian people including children like those above is legally and morally justified. Neither side is morally above the other, but only one of them continues this conflict, the Zionist nationalists who are opting to take all of original Palestine and turn it into Greater Israel.

You implicitly concur with the idea that Israel has the right to keep the Palestinian people under military occupation, while it colonizes, steals, that is, its lands. This has been going on for 41 years now. But you want everyone to believe that Israel is the victim here, and Palestinians, the terrorist perpetrators. Too bad international law does not concur with this twisted logic.

You also ignore the fact that Hamas has proposed a cease fire well over a half dozen times, and on two occasions voluntarily ceased fire for a month each time (as Carter reported). In the meantime, Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinians, mostly civilians, in Gaza as well as the West Bank. They have killed thirteen times more Palestinians, in fact. All this on the pretext that the Palestinians will rearm, as if they aren't doing that all the time, and Israel knows it. Israel's real fear is that Hamas will begin to look like they want peace. Then what? What excuse will Israel have left to continue the occupation.

As Siegman said recently, Israel has no interest in peace, and as Carter said, Israel wants the land, not peace. You have to be pretty dull not to have come up with that conclusion some time ago.

And you also ignore the fact that collective punishment, especially of a people living under military occupation, is illegal by international law. And that is Gaza's story.

Why do the Jews control it again?  Have they been there for the last thousands of years?

No.  After World War 2 they were given the land in the re-drawing of the borders and the Palastinians were driven out, causing much hardship and death.

You don't seem interested in hearing any other side of the story.  To you they're terrorists.  To them, they are freedom fighters.  The truth is somewhere in between.

If we're going to promote democracy, we need to acknowledge the choices of sovereign peoples, even if we don't agree with them.  Democracy isn't democracy only if we approve of the people fairly elected.

Hamas was elected legally.  We need to start treating this more as a conflict between governments and less as a terrorist problem.

Hamas was not deemed a terrorist organization until after they won the election; it was a propaganda ploy to dislodge them from the reigns of government. Apparently, some democracies are not what they seem to be.

The hoax of it all was that the Palestinians were under military occupation and their democracy was only as good as the last Israeli rifle in their faces.

You apparently have never seen Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land. Please click on below and find about Israel's propaganda farce to turn itself into a victim of terrorism.

"They blow up buses and cafes, hold schools hostages (where did this happen), burn US and Israeli flags/effigies, and expect leverage?"

Months before they blew up buses and cafes, Israel was busy applying state terrorism inside the West Bank and Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, like those described below. Their acts, however, deplorable, were done out of vengance not terrorism, which you probably are unable to define. Look it up. In the meantime, read on:

The first suicide bombing in the second intifadah was on Dec. 22 (no Israelis died in it). By that time, 86 Palestinian children (<18 years of age) had been killed by Israelis http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/rem ember2000.html

The first Israeli child was killed on Jan. 17, 2001 (http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/rem ember2001.html) So by that time, almost 90 Palestinian children had been killed by Israelis.

Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following about some of those children:

Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let's be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.

In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel's armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.  

See Alison Weir's short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= -5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Foc us

To be accurate, there were sporadic bombing incidents engineered by Hamas extremists in Israel during the Oslo period. None at all occurred between 1998 and 2000. But the strong resumption of attacks after 2000, over fifty in the first year, was directly related to civilian and child killings by IDF, and it was not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations that were involved.

This Time.com article apprises of what motivated them:

"Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole--some might say brainwash--young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.

But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas--and they didn't require persuading. "We don't need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas' senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. "When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong," he explained."

From the mouth of Rantisi, but it also motivated Fatah supporters, to exact revenge for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Revenge is not a formal use of terrorism. See Alison Weir's film, Off The Charts, at Google Video.

(Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl e/0,9171,1101020415-227546,00.html

This commentary is from an article by Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, which cynically denounced Olmert's statements professing concern for the well-being of Palestinian children:

(read Ehud Olmert's Profound Ethics and Deep Lies,
http://www.ramikhouri.com/)

"For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.

In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:

* 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.

* Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.

* 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.

* The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.

* During the first two months of the intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.

* An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.

* There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.

The Israeli army killing of Palestinian children continues apace. In its annual report May 16, the respected global human rights organization Amnesty International accused the Israeli army of killing 190 Palestinians, including 50 children, last year (2005)."

Here is some commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber:

"If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the "Man bites dog" news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly -- it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.

Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the "disengagement", the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.

Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.

Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family's lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.

Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.

Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its latest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organization, complacent Western societies and Fatma's memory."

The land was taken from the Palastinians after WWII because the Jews wanted their own state.