A former Israeli air-force pilot spoke on the BBC today, calling Israeli actions in Gaza terrible crimes and calling on President Elect Obama not to be a slave to Israel and AIPAC. As a former fellow IDF officer who has witnessed first hand the genocidal conduct of Israel against the Palestinian people I'd like to command my brother-in-arms for his decency and courage. I had it easy-as a US citizen who volunteered to serve in the IDF I returned to my native California, heart broken and disgusted, never to set foot in Israel again. Captain Shapira will have to go back to Israel and deal with being an outcast, although I know for a fact that many of my fellow officers and brothers in arm are sick to their stomach at Israel's horrific crimes.

nobody bothered to tell Reid that the Democrats actually won the last elections?

Israel’s disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a desire to forestall the political consequences—especially during an electoral campaign—of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was “a subhuman existence,” the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967—twenty years before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land’s actual population had to say about it.

Many people, especially on the left, persist in thinking that Israel is only a pawn in an American capitalist or imperialist strategy to control the Middle East. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel is of no use to anybody or anything but its own fantasies of domination. There is no petroleum in Israel, or Lebanon, or Golan, or Gaza. The so-called wars for oil, in 1991 and 2003, were waged by the United States, with no help from Israel, and in 1991 with the explicit demand from the United States that Israel stay out (because Israel’s participation would have undermined Washington’s Arab coalition). For the pro-Western petro-monarchies and the "moderate" Arab regimes, Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands is a nightmare, which radicalizes much of their populations and threatens their rule. It is Israel, by its absurd policies, that provoked the creation of both Hezbollah and Hamas and that is indirectly responsible for much of the recent growth of "radical Islam".

This tactic was used against apartheid in South Africa in a very similar situation. Both apartheid and the dispossession of the Palestinians are a late heritage of European colonialism, whose practitioners have a hard time realizing that such forms of domination are no longer acceptable to the world in general and even to public opinion in the West. The racist ideologies underlying both projects are an outrage to the majority of humanity and gives rise to endless hatreds and conflicts. One might even say that Israel is another South Africa, plus exploitation of "the Holocaust" as an excuse for genocide.

If you take a helicopter ride over the West Bank, you'll think you were in South Africa circa 1980. The Palestinians have been reduced to a few cantons/bantustans, cut off from one another by Jewish settlements, for-Jews-only highways and check points. The "two states solution" is not viable anymore, since a state must have territorial continuity. Gaza has been turned to the world's largest favela, cut off from the rest of the world by both Israel and Egypt. Menachem Begin, a native of Poland, used to deny he had been a terrorist, claiming that his Irgun was fighting to liberate Jewish land from British occupation. If anything, the Palestinians have much more right to fight for the liberation of their occupied land than Polish/Russia/US/French, etc born Jews.

Israel started blockading Gaza before the 2005 IDF redeployment and removal of the illegal settlements. The blockade began before Hamas won the elections. Moreover, the redeployment was unilateral. It didn't come as a result of orderly negotiations with the PA, but as a tactical, cynical ploy, designed to save money and resources that would be directed toward the much coveted West Bank and the massive land theft of Palestinian land there. The tedious Likud/neocon mantra of "Israel withdraws and gets rocket attacks in return" is worthy of Der Stürmer.

Another "small" detail the US press never mentions or follows up on:many of the parts for the crude Hamas rockets are actually supplied and smuggled into Gaza by the Israeli Russian Mafia, using former Soviet Union born soldiers who steal the parts from the IDF. Not everything is smuggled in from Egypt.