I can't believe how the US government supports this, time after time. But then again we're the ones who have done, like, what to Iraq? We're alike as two peas in a pod.

Someone early in the thread put it best: maybe people should just stop being assholes. Governments included.

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Instead, I will post a link to my favorite rabbi's blog (Rabbi Brant Rosen - I'm a Conservative, he's a Reconstructionist) and a passage from what he wrote last week:

"The news today out of Israel and Gaza makes me just sick to my stomach.

I know, I can already hear the responses: every nation has a responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens. If the Qassams stopped, Israel wouldn't be forced to take military action. Hamas also bears responsibility for this tragic situation…

I could answer each and every one of these claims in turn, but I'm ready to stop this perverse game of rhetorical ping-pong. I don't buy the rationalizations any more. I'm so tired of the apologetics. How on earth will squeezing the life out of Gaza, not to mention bombing the living hell out of it, ensure the safety of Israeli citizens?...

So no more rationalizations. What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is an outrage."

[rabbibrant.com]

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To those of you who are arguing that this is a death struggle, ongoing for millenia, my view is that it isn't, because if we do know anything for sure, it's that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians (and it will inevitably be more than the Palestinians, FYI) are, of themselves, monolith. No one, by mere accident of birth, comes programmed with a hatred for the other side.

What is true: there are many, many people who will die in this conflict and others because someone has decided an idea is more important than a person. Somebody has decided it is more important to be "right" (and we all know that in the real world, right is a complicated thing) than to keep someone else's kid or mother or husband alive, at all costs. And that's the actual problem here.

The people who will tell you that belonging to any group greater than that of humanity is worth bombing somebody else's kids is, to put it bluntly, full of shit, whether they're a Hamas insurgent or an Israeli parliamentarian or the President of the United States.

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