More to the point: for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life). No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth.



So extreme is their emotional identification with one side (Israel) that it literally never occurs to them to give any thought to any of that, to imagine what it's like to live in those circumstances.

But I was surprised to find that although the people of Sderot who I met wanted the missiles to end they understood that militarism would not protect them.



The people I met with were not calling for war, they were calling for negotiation.

And so this is an unnecessary, cruel and cynical war -- a war that could have been avoided if our leaders had shown courage during the months of the cease-fire to truly work toward creating better lives for people whose only crime is that they live in the south.

But I know the answer to our conflict will not come with this war. We will know peace only when we accept the fact that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have every right to lives of dignity. We will know peace only when we recognize that we must negotiate with Hamas, our enemy, even if we are devastated that the Palestinians did not elect a more moderate party to lead them. We will know peace only when our leaders stop considering our lives cheap and expendable, and help us create a beautiful, green Negev, free of fear and despair.

still

not

the best thing ever to happen to Germany

It's happening slowly, but it is happening. Blinkered American opinion is shifting. With each atrocity committed by the bloodthirsty Israelis, more Americans lose their ability to rationalize the inexcusable. I admire what Glenn Greenwald has written:The excuse for the current massacre of Palestinian civilians comes down to so-called "rocket attacks" on the border town of Sderot. Those attacks took 13 victims in eight years, and not one of the victims is recent. Adam Horowitz has been to Sderot: Julia Chaitin , a senior lecturer at the Sapir Academic College near Sderot, has written these words:The current destruction of Gaza reminds me of the Ardeatine massacre of World War II. On March 23, 1944, Italian partisans in Rome launched an attack on a facist convoy, killing 28. Hitler ordered the reprisal killing of 50 Italian partisans for every dead fascist. The German security commander in Rome, Herbert Kappler, "downsized" this directive to a 10-to-1 ratio. As a result, 280 Italians (mostly civilians) were murdered in the Ardeatine caves, an atrocity which has lived in the annals of infamy.Ten-to-one reprisal killings. During World War II. And people areangry about it. And now, in retaliation for 15 rocket attacks over the course of eight years, Israel has decided to massacre an entire civilian population. The proportions are much worse than 10-to-1, worse than Hitler's suggestion of 50-to-1.And yet here in America, there are still people -- if we can use the term "people" to describe such pitiless brutes -- who would consider this "retaliation" against the Palestinians justified. Most of these brutes are not Jews but so-called Christian Zionists.Consider the historical irony, as you compare Gaza to the Ardeatine massacre. Hitler was far kinder to the Italian partisans than Israel is to the Palestinians.Too many Jews learned the wrong lesson from World War II. The victims of persecution came to equate strength with a willingness to persecute others. Like many other peoples in many other times and places, a large number of Jews were seduced into the false belief that the hardest heart beats longest.But history teaches a very different lesson. Hitler's Germany didlast. The Third Reich was destroyed for its evil. Germany was divided like an earthworm. Yet it recovered. Who can deny that -- in the long run --was the eradication of its government and its (temporary) loss of national sovereignty at the end of World War II?I'm afraid that it is far too late to realize Julia Chaitin's dream. I fear that the time for negotiation has passed.Israel must be destroyed, just as Hitler's Germany was destroyed. All Jews throughout the world must forevermore rid themselves of the lunatic, racist dream of "Jewish state." Jews living in Israel will either agree to live in a single multi-ethnic democracy in which everyone ruled (directly or indirectly) by the government has an equal vote -- or they will die in their madness.