Mr. Base Writes:
"My commentary: Israel is guilty of war crimes and is an international rogue that is causing the US immeasurable pain. The relationship is not worth it.".

Off course. A texbook prescription of terror. Here is how hamas does it.

1) Go ahead and provoke you neighbor (Israel) with low intensity, under the radar rocket attacks (10,000 of them over the course of 6 years) onto his civilian population. Notwithsdanding the pyschological fear under which 900,000 Israeli civilain were living.

2) Hope to wear out your opponents resolve and will to fight back.

3) watch their population abandon (wishful thinking) their cities and towns, and move either inland, or better, head to the nearest sea or airport .

4) Wallah!!! mission accomplish - land has been "liberated". Move right in and enjoy the loot.

Oh, there is a little problem with that pipe dream.

5) When that foe with the most powerful military in the region and fiercly deternmained force, does the opposite and move in to stop you. Then sure enough.

6) Put that "Plan B" into action. Order your military forces to change into civilain dress, and hide behind their woman and children. Booby-trap schools and other civilain centers with explosives, with clear intention of exposing those innocent civilains to harms way.

7) It is show time baby. Get the video cameras ready. "If it bleeds, it leads".

8) Show the dead bodies of those innocent children to the worldwide viewers. to create outrage - never mind, you are the one who started, and caused these mayhem in the first place.

9) When outside parties come into Gaza to gather evidence, make sure they will get only the insidious version which Hamas wants them to see - not necessary the true picture.

I think, the rest of the world, including many Arab states are up to Hamas / Iran tricks and have given up on this group of terrorists, and care little about this group of thugs.

That what I call, the "Palestinian Fatigue".

And here's how the State Of Israel came in to being:

1) Go ahead and provoke the ruling authority (Britain) and inhabitants of the land (Arabs) with bombings and massacres.

2) Wear out your opponents resolve and will to fight back.

3) Watch their population abandon (wishful thinking) their villages and farms, and move either inland, or better, head to the nearest refugee camp in another country.

4) Mazel tov!!! mission accomplish – land has been "liberated". Move right in and enjoy the loot.

I guess Hamas learned a few lessons from the Lehi and Irgun...

The IDF spent about a year leading up to the war gathering intelligence. They knew the truce (a word loosely used here) would not last. They had enough information to make phone calls to residents before they bombed a home. On the first day, they had up to date information that the Hamas leadership re-occupied their headquarters after leaving it the day before in fear of an attack. They identified dozens of tunnels, weapon storage sites and the such. There was no lack of intelligence gathering.
Secondly, there is no known way to stop the rocket fire without imposing some cost on the population. If there was (Israel is about to deploy a missile shield) at the time they would prefer that to killing. However, there is a cost to firing rockets on the civilian population of a country with a very powerful army. Hamas invited that cost and it was imposed upon their population. Needless to say, given their capability, the IDF restrained itself.
I can tell you the Israelis do not like that they have to use their army (remember it is their own sons and husbands, and everyone knows someone who has died in a war). But they do not put the burden of defending the country on their children so that they can sit in a tank and watch rockets fly into their cities. They have acted as any country would. There is no non-lethal method of stopping the rockets yet, and when it's available I guarantee Israel will use it to avoid the casualties to their soldiers and the negative perception war brings to them. Until then, deterrence is the only thing to stop the rockets.

I was just pointing out that the incomplete and haphazard methods that Israel used, and uses amounts to collective punishment that can only serve to strengthen Hamas and give Israel's enemies plenty of ammunition to attack them in the media.

The force used achieved it's limited objective, but it has no real utility because it has strengthed Israel's enemies. It was short term solution to a long term problem.

On a practical note, does anyone in the world actually believe that the withdrawal of US support of Israel would bring peace to the middle east? That does not make a whole lot of sense. There would still be many other conflicts in the region, and supposing the withdrawal of support led to the destruction of the state of Israel, which you seem to want, what would stand in its place? Fighting would most likely erupt between Hamas and the PA, and every power in the region would be jockeying for influence and trying to turn it into a client state, like Syria did with Lebanon. If you haven't already done so, read up on the Jordanian massacre in the West Bank during "Black September" and tell me in all seriousness that alliances such as Iran-Hizbullah-Hamas would hold up without the common enemy of Israel to rally against. I'm not trying to weigh moral arguments in any sense, but you can't get me to believe that taking Israel out of the equation would intrinsically remove all the other complications in the region, let alone creating new ones. The geopolitical dynamics of the region's instability go far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it continues to baffle me that people take such a reductionist approach.

Second of all, say what you want about the IDF, but Israel is not a "theocratic ethnocracy." It is a democratically elected government, in which people regardless of religion or ethnicity (yes, that includes Arabs and Muslims) are allowed to vote and form congressional parties, and have exercised these rights for years. Even in the occupied territories, Hamas and the PA are in power because they won elections. The decisions of voters can always be questioned, but you cannot deny that they have the right to make decisions in the first place. Israel is no more a theocratic ethnocracy than the United States.

Mr. BOMOOR writes:
"How long can Israel hide behind "they made us kill them?"

REPLY:
You seem to defend a group like Hamas which proves you wrong. Here is how. READ ON.

Excerpts from Hamas's 1988 Covenant – In their own words

QUOTE : “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).”

Here is more of the same filth.

QUOTE: “INTRODUCTION (5th paragraph). This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised.”

WATCH HOW A 1,350 YEARS OF BLIND HATRED AGAINST JEWS, WHICH GOES BACK TO MOHAMMED HIMSELF, HAS BEEN "REPACKAGED" INTO MERE 62 YEARS OF ARAB ISRAELI CONFLICT.

QUOTE: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).”

Here is the link to Yale University's law School – Avalon project, where Hamas's manuscript is published in its entirety. ,

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm]Hamas Covenant 1988

Please. Your clinging to a 1988 Charter. Pal, get with the program, it's the 21st century.
Hamas has accepted Israel's right to exist and would be prepared to nullify its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Aziz Dwaik, Hamas's most senior representative in the West Bank, said on Wednesday.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1263147942240&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

In January 2006 Hamas published its official platform for the upcoming Palestinian elections; it included no language calling for the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state in all of Palestine. To be sure, the apparent change in Hamas’s position was ambiguous, for it continued to proclaim that it did not reject any means, “including armed resistance,” in order to “end the occupation… and establish a state whose capital is Jerusalem.”

As Israeli analysts noted, the Hamas platform did not specify whether such a state would be limited to the West Bank and Gaza and did not clarify whether “the occupation” to be ended referred only to the post-1967 Israeli expansion or to the entire Jewish state.
Even so, the very ambiguity greatly differed from earlier Hamas extremism and even suggested that despite its ideology, the operational goals of Hamas now might not substantially differ from those of Abbas and other Palestinian moderates.

*Soon after its election, Hamas began to go public with its new position. For example, in May 2006 Haniyeh told Haaretz that the Hamas government would agree to a long-term truce with Israel if it withdrew to the 1967 lines, and a few months later he told an American scholar that “We have no problem with a sovereign Palestinian state over all of our lands within the 1967 borders, living in calm.”

Perhaps even more important was the May 2006 joint statement of senior Hamas and Fatah members who were imprisoned in Israel. The prestigious “Prisoner’s Declaration” went much further than the earlier Hamas overtures: abandoning the previous ambiguities, it called for the establishment of a Palestinian state “in all the lands occupied in 1967,” and reserved the use of armed resistance only in those territories.

Zionism is the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from ‘Jewish’ land. You can’t accuse Hamas while ignoring all the right wingers in Israel who call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. You’re a hypocrite and not very good one at that.

Here watch how in an interview with Al Jazzira English, how he speaks to the English speaking viewers.

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/talktojazeera/2009/12/2009121715913988277.html

At the same time period, watch how speaks to the people of Gaza in Arabic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WC-NYA8B6Y&feature=related

The same man, two different messages, to two different groups.

Then you tell me, should Israelis believe to his bogus and purported "recognition of Israel".

Mr. BOMOOR,
One more time you are posting misleading and inaccurate comments about Israel and Jews. And one more time, I need to step in and correct your errors about my country.

1. The name of our country then was "Israel", as it is today.

2. Jews did not leave their country on their own volition. Rather, they were forced out by the Roman, to suppress their will to live as free people in the land of their ancestors.

3. All throughout those 1900+ years, Jews had never ever given up their hope to someday they will return to their land, where their spiritual center is located. (Remember that Jerusalem (which is claimed by Muslims as their holy site) was built by Jews.

4. 50% of the Jews who immigrated to Israel came from Arab-Islamic and North African countries.

5. Despite our Western based economy and political system, we the Israelis have our own unique cultural based on wonderful conversion of the European (West, and East) and Middle Eastern cultures. As someone else had pointed out, had you spent sometimes in Israel, you would witness the manifestation of all these elements work in a democratic and open society as we are in Israel.

6. In your comment you seem to suggest that the ME & Gulf region are sole enclave to the Arab-Islamic group. It is not.

7. "The chosen one". Please, cut the ditribe with this nonesense. I have never heard or seen any rational and level headed Israeli declares himself as "chosen one". If you elect to "chose me", fine do it, as long as it is intended for construtive purpose.

8. Those so-called "Palestinians", never called, nor defined themselves as such, while they were under the occupation of Jordan (WB & E. Jerusalem), and Eygpt (Gaza). It is only after 1967 war, when these territories came under Israel, then these Arabs "chosen" themselves as (ancient) Philistine. Which all records show, they had no connection with at all.

Finally, when you show me a 2000 year old (Dead Sea) manuscript written in Arabic, then Arabs may have some foundation to their so-called "ancestral" presence in that region. The fact is, these scrolls are written in Hebrew, the same Alpha-Bet and language written and spoken in Israel today.

Mr. BOMOOR,
One more time you are posting misleading and inaccurate comments about Israel and Jews. And one more time, I need to step in and correct your errors about my country.

1. The name of our country then was "Israel", as it is today.

2. Jews did not leave their country on their own volition. Rather, they were forced out by the Roman, to suppress their will to live as free people in the land of their ancestors.

3. All throughout those 1900+ years, Jews had never ever given up their hope to someday they will return to their land, where their spiritual center is located. (Remember that Jerusalem (which is claimed by Muslims as their holy site) was built by Jews.

4. 50% of the Jews who immigrated to Israel came from Arab-Islamic and North African countries.

5. Despite our Western based economy and political system, we the Israelis have our own unique cultural based on wonderful conversion of the European (West, and East) and Middle Eastern cultures. As someone else had pointed out, had you spent sometimes in Israel, you would witness the manifestation of all these elements work in a democratic and open society as we are in Israel.

6. In your comment you seem to suggest that the ME & Gulf region are sole enclave to the Arab-Islamic group. It is not.

7. "The chosen one". Please, cut the ditribe with this nonesense. I have never heard or seen any rational and level headed Israeli declares himself as "chosen one". If you elect to "chose me", fine do it, as long as it is intended for construtive purpose.

8. Those so-called "Palestinians", never called, nor defined themselves as such, while they were under the occupation of Jordan (WB & E. Jerusalem), and Eygpt (Gaza). It is only after 1967 war, when these territories came under Israel, then these Arabs "chosen" themselves as (ancient) Philistine. Which all records show, they had no connection with at all.

Finally, when you show me a 2000 year old (Dead Sea) manuscript written in Arabic, then Arabs may have some foundation to their so-called "ancestral" presence in that region. The fact is, these scrolls are written in Hebrew, the same Alpha-Bet and language written and spoken in Israel today.

Mr. BOMOOR,
One more time you are posting misleading and inaccurate comments about Israel and Jews. And one more time, I need to step in and correct your errors about my country.

1. The name of our country then was "Israel", as it is today.

2. Jews did not leave their country on their own volition. Rather, they were forced out by the Roman, to suppress their will to live as free people in the land of their ancestors.

3. All throughout those 1900+ years, Jews had never ever given up their hope to someday they will return to their land, where their spiritual center is located. (Remember that Jerusalem (which is claimed by Muslims as their holy site) was built by Jews.

4. 50% of the Jews who immigrated to Israel came from Arab-Islamic and North African countries.

5. Despite our Western based economy and political system, we the Israelis have our own unique cultural based on wonderful conversion of the European (West, and East) and Middle Eastern cultures. As someone else had pointed out, had you spent sometimes in Israel, you would witness the manifestation of all these elements work in a democratic and open society as we are in Israel.

6. In your comment you seem to suggest that the ME & Gulf region are sole enclave to the Arab-Islamic group. It is not.

7. "The chosen one". Please, cut the ditribe with this nonesense. I have never heard or seen any rational and level headed Israeli declares himself as "chosen one". If you elect to "chose me", fine do it, as long as it is intended for construtive purpose.

8. Those so-called "Palestinians", never called, nor defined themselves as such, while they were under the occupation of Jordan (WB & E. Jerusalem), and Eygpt (Gaza). It is only after 1967 war, when these territories came under Israel, then these Arabs "chosen" themselves as (ancient) Philistine. Which all records show, they had no connection with at all.

Finally, when you show me a 2000 year old (Dead Sea) manuscript written in Arabic, then Arabs may have some foundation to their so-called "ancestral" presence in that region. The fact is, these scrolls are written in Hebrew, the same Alpha-Bet and language written and spoken in Israel today.

Surely you realize that scholarship has shown the Diaspora to be a historical myth, right?

And that in all probability, the Palestinians are the true descendants of ancient Israelis, something acknowledged even by the second president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi? And before you start accusing this Jew of anti-semitism, I should note that it is JEWISH scholarship that has established this (likely because Jews are the only ones who can utter even the slightest criticism of Israel without being equated to a Nazi):

"But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”
http://peoplesgeography.com/2008/03/24/sands-the-invention-of-the-diaspora/

"[Dr. Schlomo] Sand [a professor of history at Tel Aviv University], himself a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.

"However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a national history to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.
http://open.salon.com/blog/dennis_loo/2009/04/11/israeli_scholar_the_diaspora_story_is_a_myth

Just because 2000 years have brought them to a different religion doesn't mean your (and my) people have a right to displace and/or exterminate them, simply because we have decided we want what is, and always has been, theirs. Nor does our continued affirmation of a demonstrably false historical myth, especially one that didn't even exist 100 years ago.

On a different note, I never fail to be horrified by the Zionists' willingness to use the Holocaust, along with any other historical episode of anti-Semitic persecution, to justify their own atrocities. As someone who took great, great pride in my Jewish blood throughout my adolescence, nothing has been more painful than realizing what "my people" have become, or at least what is done in their name.

I'm pretty sure that it was Hitler with his ever more fantasy version of his Reich that lead Nazi Germany to defeat, not the army.

On the topic of Israel, if you had, over 6 years, 10,000 rockets fired into your cities and civilian population, that's a lot of patience. How many other nations can say that they held back for that long while being hit by enemy weaponry? Israel finally got fed up. I guess its kind of like continually poking someone until they finally snap and punch you in the face. Was Israel right in doing this, depends on who you ask. Did they conduct their response well, most will probably say no, they screwed it up, killed too many civilians. Did Hamas deserve it, hell yes.

I mean, really, how can you expect to launch thousands of rockets at civilians and then not expect some sort of response from the region's most powerful military, the very people you were shooting at?

Neither are the Israeli's. "Personally, I've fealt that negotiation was always pretty hopeless when the opposition doesn't admit your right to exist." You must mean how the Israeli's deny the Palestinians the right to exist and to have a sovereign state right ?

so, are you?

this is the same rhetoric that arises from the crazy jihadists, pulled from ancient texts, attributed to a higher all knowing being, that commands them to what..? kill??? and claim stems back to, or at least they would tell us that its all because of, drawn lines in the sand, about who should live on this side of the line or on that side.

this fighting is the dumbest waste of time and energy i have ever seen/heard. we will not fix it from our comfortable cubbies and couches. or by quoting the bible, or prehistoric text from cave walls.

wake up.
this is about power, manipulation, and greed.

if you do not believe that, you are missing the point. the qualities that the 3 religions insist that you possess should be utilized here to push the b.s. aside and get to the core issue.

in order to evaluate and come to sane decisions regarding your actions and the actions of those you associate with in your life, you must choose love first. from there, the answers are much easier to attain.

the rest is for the ignorant.

To Bomoore:
. Your religion is brutal and rapist. It's the reason the USA has been in four or five wars since the Viet Nam war... Let me name them for you: Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Afrika (Clinton Cruise missiled two factories.) Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, The Phillipines... There have been proxy wars fought in south american countries by troops trained at the School of the Americas in the US... Communist Athiest China has been in Four also: India, Russia, Tibet and Viet Nam... Get it?
. Do you see where I'm going with this? Your religion, your bible was written by a bevy of angry, scared little mullahs to intimidate or fascinate people into giving THEM money. Read your bible: Deuter: 23: 13-21 - Stone your wife to death on her father's doorstep if she's not a virgin.
Deut. 22: - Stone undisciplined children to death, no privy member, no entering into the kingdom of heaven.
Exodus 21: 7-11 - you can sell your daughter in to slavery, if you want to.
Exodus 22:18 - Don't suffer witches to live.
Leviticus 25: 44-46 - You can hold slaves as long as they are heathens... Do you think, when the white settlers were murdering, holocausting the native american indians, that the whites looked at each other in their fascist little church pews and said: We can't kill those heathens and enslave those black people, because someday they may produce a president of the USA?
Matthew 15: 21 to 28 - Jesus won't waste his time on a non jew. Do you see a disconnect between loyalties here?
Numbers 31:15 - 19 - Kill all the males and non virgin women, and keep the virgin girls for yourselves. Aren't we being a little indulgent here? Aren't we all supposed to have one woman and one man that are married, to copulate?
Timothy 6: 1-4 - Slavves obey your masters, especially xtian masters. I believe that you, Bomoore, are not capable of recognizing that your religion is brutal and rapist, even though I've laid it all out for you. Rapist? Yes, as the rapist forces what he thinks is pleasure on a woman with a gun or a knife, xtians force what they think is righteousness on people with the threat of a devil, or just by simply cutting off their heads with a sword, as xtians have been wont to do since the time of christ.

. Singed: Giordano Bruno, the guy the vatican burned at the stake for telling hem the earth goes around the sun.