The World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001 just as I finished reading this Tom Friedman column (a link that may not work unless you subscribe to the NY Times):

[T]he status quo is politically quite tolerable for both the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, and Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. For the moment, each is riding high in the polls, and neither has to confront his hard-line base and say the game is up. The status quo is also tolerable for President Bush, because as long as there is no peace process he doesn't have to pressure Israel to compromise, which is the last thing he wants to do, since it would inevitably force a clash with U.S. Jews, whose votes and donations he needs to protect his G.O.P. majority in the House.

But while the leaders are unable to forge the big partition, and can tolerate the status quo, the people increasingly can't. So what's happening on the ground is a million little personal partitions. People all over Israel are building their own walls to separate themselves from danger. ''Everyone is now their own minister of defense,'' said an Israeli colleague.

West Bank settlers are isolated from friends in Israel because they are afraid to take responsibility for inviting anyone to visit their settlements for fear they will be shot on the roads. Israeli parents refuse to let their kids go to malls, cinemas or discos that might be targets of suicide bombers. ''First I decide which movie theater I think will be the safest, then I check which movie is playing,'' an Israeli mother told me.

You drive north to the Jerusalem suburb of Psagot, which overlooks Ramallah, and you find that the houses with the best view of the Ramallah hills now have an anti-sniper concrete wall in front of them and sandbags on the windows. You drive south, between the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo and the Arab village of Beit Jala, and there is another long concrete wall blocking snipers from hitting Gilo, but also sealing in Gilo. There are Hebrew posters all over this wall that read: ''The New Middle East.'' Some Israeli coffee shops now have security guards at the door to deter suicide bombers.

Now, more than seven years later, this maybe a slightly dramatized version of what it was like in Siderot, Israel, both during, and certainly just after, the "pause" in hostilities to and from Gaza ended:



The other day, Rachel Maddow put what has happened in some perspective this way:

Israel launches third day of attacks on Gaza. Chaos in the Middle East; Arab-Israeli conflict erupts. Again? Yes, again.

Now, there's a reason these headlines are so familiar. Here is where

Israel is. It's a tiny country, a Jewish state, right smack-dab in the

middle of the Arab world, surrounded on all sides by Arab nations. Many of

whom do not recognize Israel's right to exist

Israel was, in a sense, conceived by war. A day after it declared its independence in May 1948, it was attacked by five neighboring countries, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. What followed were decades of endless wars fought on and near Israeli soil. A war with Egypt in 1956, another with Egypt and Jordan, and Syria in 1967, another with Egypt and Syria in 1973, one with Lebanon in 1982, and so on and so on and so on.

And on top of various military entanglements with its neighbors, Israel has also been embroiled in various uprisings within its own borders, among the Palestinian people. You will recall that famous handshake at the White House, right? Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, agreeing to a declaration of principles that said the Palestinians would be allowed to govern themselves in two areas: in the West Bank, a swath of land along Israeli's border with Jordan, and another tiny sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea that's known as the Gaza Strip.

The war being fought at this hour is in that little sliver of land, the Gaza Strip. It's actually only about twice the size of Washington, D.C. Now, Israel withdrew from that land in 2005. But they still control the airspace, the territorial waters, and the Gaza-Israeli border. They are currently enforcing an embargo on the Gaza Strip.

Once the Palestinians achieved some degree of independence there, they did what independent people do. What the U.S., in fact, encouraged them to do, they held elections. And in those elections, the ruling nationalist party, Yasser Arafat's party, Fatah, was defeated soundly by Hamas.

Now, Fatah that was no "league of women" voters, but say what you will about them, they did begrudgingly, accept theoretically, Israel's right to exist. Hamas, not so much. Not so much at all.

The charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the both the United States and the European Union. The net result of that election for Israel, yet another neighbor bent on its complete destruction.

Israel says rockets and mortars lobbed from Gaza into Israel killed nine Israeli civilians since the beginning of this year. A shaky ceasefire between Gaza and Israel that had been brokered by Egypt, that expired just a little more than a week ago. On Saturday then, there was a surprise broad daylight coordinated air assault by the Israeli military on what Israel says were military targets in Gaza. Another round of headlines that scream, "Chaos in the Middle East," "Chaos in the Middle East erupts again."

More than 300 dead on the Palestinian side in the last three days. Three confirmed dead, so far, on the Israeli side. Israel's critics decry a disproportionate response to the rocket fire. An emboldened Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini says that any Muslim who dies in defense of Gaza would be deemed a martyr.

Israel's defenders decry the Hamas government's refusal to recognize Israeli's right to exist. And, of course, the unprovoked missile fire into southern Israel. Today, Israel's United Nations ambassador said the goal of Israeli's military offensive is to, quote, "destroy completely" Hamas. Meanwhile, Palestinian rocket fire into Israel continued despite the massive Israeli military attack.

Now, as President Bush refuses to interrupt his last vacation as president to say anything about the Middle East tender box, he purports to focus on so intently, is there hope that our new presidential leadership in our country could make a difference there? Or is this a situation in which there will always be violence which precludes a political solution? And without a political solution, we can't ever have anything but more violence. Do you think that our kids and their kids and their kids will inexorably, inevitably read the same headlines from the Middle East that we do now and that we have for so many years?

With that backdrop this blog herewith presents a catalogue of recent discussions about Gaza which have taken place on Daily Kos recently, in which your faithful blogger has been a participant:

12/28:

In terms of world history, Nazi Germany was defeated yesterday and the use of modern methods to destroy the Jewish people capped centuries where governments and groups with less exotic means at their disposal, attempted to do the same thing.

It is way too soon for Jews to relax and, in that stupid expression of our day, move on or achieve closure.

But this diary and Bronner's article raises the same question I first heard from Tom Friedman (I know his name brings on flames here, but I like his work) and which, I think, he sourced to David ben Gurion. The choices facing Israel are which 2 of 3 they want: a Jewish state, a democratic state, or occupier of all of the biblical Eretz Yisrael.

Israel, for the most part, has decided that they want one and two, which are not easy to reconcile, but possible. But these remain difficult questions.

12/29:

Pretend for a moment that there was a Canada/United States "grudge match" as you call it. (When it involves other countries, such disputes always seem "tribal" and somewhat trivial.)

Suppose, that as a gesture toward some new arrangement, the United States withdrew from occupied portions of southern Quebec and permitted some degree of self-rule there, but the result of "free elections" was a government which had different ideas. This new government in southern Quebec began shelling and sending missiles into, say, Franklin County, NY and intelligence showed these missiles and bombs were fired from launchers placed within civilian areas of southern Quebec.

Would it be "anger" or a desire to protect the civilian population of northern New York which would impel the United States to take what military steps were necessary to make this attacks stop and stop for good?

We are taking big steps backward here, but I cannot understand how this is Israel's fault unless you say that their withdrawal from Gaza was premature or misguided, or the idea that free elections could be conducted there was.

Later that day, to a post as to how sad the anti Israel stuff on DK had become and how much of it morphed into attacks on Jews in general:

This is not the best part of the so-called "progressive" community.

The separateness we discussed the other day gets very bad when Israel comes up. People who are not Jewish often lecture American Jews about "getting over" what happened in Europe in the prior century, culminating in a holocaust that many non-Germans seemed to accept until it became a war issue.

They do not understand why the United Nations established the State of Israel and what it means. They use the word "occupier" not only to mean parts of the area that the Israelis have captured after being attacked and which they hold for their protection, but to mean the whole or significant parts of Israel itself.

Yes, I feel this, too, none more than when I travel around this site. I have come to understand that DailyKos itself is not so hostile to Israel, nor are most of those who post here, but it attracts a large number of people who say some horrible and hateful things, and they get a lot of tv time, too.

Still later:

[It] takes effort on all sides to make peace. Withdrawal from Gaza can not be met with bombs from Gaza and finding "fault with all sides" is not only unhelpful, it is wrong.

And I tell you this: as long as Israelis feel that gestures toward peace are met with bombs, it will be hard to make gestures toward peace.

And, Something, I cannot fault them for that. (I, too, have had objections to various Israeli moves, such as the settlements in territory controlled for military reasons, but these pale in the face of the constant attacks Israelis face every day and lecturing them from this safe distance is not something I intend to do, especially when so many who wish them nothing but ill, fill that void.)

I [,too,] am [an] unlikely candidate to be in full throated defense of Israel, but events and the commentary I read are moving me there very quickly.


and even later:

"world opinion" sadly never cares about right and wrong. They had to be pushed into doing something about Serbian "ethnic cleansing" and will do nothing useful in Darfur until there is no danger there. They looked the other way in Cambodia/Kampuchea (while filled with lectures when the US did the truly wrong thing there in 1972).

President Wilson had a great idea after the first World War, but it didn't work because the world was not ready for a League of Nations. I am not sure we have progressed a whole lot since then.

followed by:

How about we take away the immediate attack on them upon the creation of the State of Israel and the unremitting attempts to destroy them since then?

The "death count" and the constant threat of violence in the area comes from that and that alone. Forty years later and still they don't stop and try to live in peace with an Israel whose borders are secure.

I have disagreed with Israel in the past, but as with many Jews on this site, reading the garbage that passes for political thought, have no interest in doing so now.

and:

what was decided was to have, ahem, two states: one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews took the little sliver they were given, and the Arabs tried to blow them away so they could have the whole thing.

But you see this thing through your glasses. There doesn't need to be any killing, but fifty years of this and the same basic equation. Today's episode is that four years after Israel left Gaza, the people who now run it find that bombing Israel is the best course for them to take.

12/30:

I thought Rachel's summary was spot on. You could add this and that , but it would go on forever. In the time she had, she did it perfectly. It is so good to know that someone with a soapbox who normally states roughly my political position, can give such a balanced description of this situation, in contrast to the many incendiary comments on this site.

This whole dialogue has to be read to be believed:


Barth, 12/30:

they elected a gov't that wants to bomb and not for peace, stability and an independent Palestinian state.

I am sorry that these are the consequences, but that's how it is.


by Euroliberal on Tue Dec 30, 2008 at 10:39:22 AM EST:

unless you provide me with a list of acceptable consequences for the American people in general as punishment for voting Bush to two terms in office, repeating this claim is just a cover for something else.

PS: I want names of cities to be bombed, number of dead and other casualties proportional to damage that administration has done. Persons to be tortured on a separate list please.



Barth Tue Dec 30, 2008 at 02:22:42 PM EST

I did not say anything about "acceptable"

The United States has paid dearly for electing Bush twice, but if the Republican Party has become a racist, xenophobic, and morally bankrupt party, they are not a terrorist organization.

by Euroliberal on Wed Dec 31, 2008 at 06:52:01 AM EST:

look at the expressions on the faces of those on the other end of shock-and-awe doctrine.

They seem terrorized enough to me.

they are not a terrorist organization

If Hamas had the same prerogative, like Bush had, to ask for a legal opinion as to whether their actions constitute terrorism or not, I'm sure they'd find some Muslim scholar to give them absolvition. Just because people don't call Bush a torturer doesn't mean he ain't one.

by Barth on Wed Dec 31, 2008 at 04:20:48 PM EST:
I don't like him either but I don't think he falls in the same category as Hamas. To say that they are morally equivalent presents a perspective that is mushes too many things into one broad, Bush-like category of evildoers.