Comment Re:Here's the bottom line (Score 1) 644
I'm sorry, but you present a quite slanted view. You are forgetting that during the decades of occupation, thousands upon thousands of innocent children, women and palestinian men have been killed by Israeli soldiers, often by sniper fire when just walking to school or playing in the garden.
You are forgetting the apartheid-like policies by the Israeli administration against palestinians, the arbitrary changes of rules, border zones etc, followed by destruction of farming property, houses and so on. The constantly moving forward of "Israeli only zones", the sporadic automatic fire from Israeli pillboxes towards farmers trying to earn an honest living.
You are forgetting the daily oppression of road blocks (that were there long before any terrorist threat) that prevent traffic flow out of no other reason than to frustrate and agitate. You forget the countless people who have died, even newly born infants, while waiting in the ambulances at the road blocks. In many cases, the ill and wounded, women in labor etc. are even mocked by racist Isreali border guards while suffering in the lines.
Even the small things, like Palestinians (and arabs in general) frequently having to endure racial slurs such as "the two legged beasts", also from high ranking politicians in the media.
The fact that the whole infrastructure of the occupied territories has over the decades slowly been ground to pieces by Isreali attacks, often (but of course not always) unprovoked. The then quite secular and culturally minded Palestinians having their cultural heritage, books, movies, paintings etc shat and pissed on (smeared with faeces), ripped to pieces.
Everything above, and countless more attacks on the Palestinian people are well documented, if somewhat hidden in mainstream media. I'm not just pulling something out of my ass here.
I'm sorry, but peace loving as I am, if I was a palestinian in the occupied territories, my daughter killed by sniper fire, my friends grandmother killed while trying to reach the hospital to treat her broken leg, my attempts at dignified life shot dead by deliberate destruction of enterprises and workplaces in my society... I would be pissed beyond all reason. (all real world examples) And quite likely to vote for the guys with the AK-47 and Kalashnikovs, no matter what their other policies are. The fact is, most palestinians are only want peace. But the Isreali policies, often driven on by a significant group of right wing religious nutjobs in the Isreali society, are actually playing right into Hamas hands. One wonders if this is a coincidence.
In short, what I'm trying to say is that the Israeli government are just as bad as Hamas when it comes to terrorism, the act of striking fear into the heart of the enemy. Don't for a second believe that they are some kind of innocent victims in this conflict, only wishing to establish a democratic, multi-ethnic western state in the area. That is blatantly not true.