Israel Conundrum

               Can we get a little balance in the news?  The 12/9 head line reads “Gaza official:  Israeli strikes kill one civilian.”  The story tells how Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza strip killed a civilian and wounded 25 others, setting fires and causing chaos.  It leaves the reader with the impression that Israelis just bomb the Gaza strip willy-nilly, just for giggles. 

              What the article fails to mention is that the air strikes were retaliation for 4 Kassam rockets and 11 mortar shells that had been fired at southern Israel from Gaza (jpost.com). Israel’s Iron Dome defense system intercepted three of the rockets and the fourth exploded in an industrial area.

Of course children and civilians are killed during those attacks.  Hamas plants its artillery near hospitals and schools and residential areas.  When Israeli strikes take out Hamas rocket launchers they are bound to harm civilians. Hamas uses the innocent as human shields. 

              The media would also have us believe that the Jews usurped the area from the “Palestinians.”  Actually Palestine was never a state or a country.  There were simply "Arabs" who moved into a geo-political area of the Ottoman Empire called "Palestine.”  About half of today’s Israelis are Mizrachim, descended from Jews who have been in the land since ancient times, about 3200 B.C.   

The Arab Islamic Empire under Caliph Omar conquered Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt in 636 C.E. Jews,  massacred in huge numbers, were forced to flee the inland villages towards the coast.  So it was not the Jews who usurped “Palestinian” lands; it’s Arabs that even today vow to carry out Calip Omars mission and drive the Jews into the sea. 

              Let’s consider a modern day scenario.  Say the Europeans who settled in this country dispersed the native populations into Europe and other parts of the world.  Say they were persecuted everywhere, slaughtered, on the brink annihilation. Suppose the international community decided to take action and force America to provide the native populations a permanent settlement in what we know as Rhode Island.  Let’s assume now that the people of New Jersey and New York and Connecticut and Pennsylvania launched rockets into the area and vowed to force the natives into the sea.

Whom would you side with: the brutal Americans attempting to drive the natives into the sea or the persecuted peoples trying desperately to hold on to a little scrap of their homeland?