...taking sides in this Palestine vs. Israel (or Israel vs. Palestine if you prefer) insanity.

The Palestinians & Israelis are equally insane.

They both commit daily atrocites in the name of their religion; they both think killing children is a clever way to add an exclamation point to their side of the argument.

If Israel is really the Jews' rightful homeland, then I hope they eventually kill enough Palestinian children to finally be able to claim it.

If Israel is a fake country propped up by Jews in order to oppress Palestinians, then I hope the Palestinians finally kill enough Israeli children to finally bring the Jews to their senses.

This whole mess is an abomination. And no clarity can be offered, because everybody is too busy taking sides.

And anybody who takes a side in this satanic endeavor is attaching themselves to to a tribal skirmish that deems killing children as counting coup.

Do you have any emotional, cultural or religious attachments to Israel that make you see it as more than just another foreign country?

"Hamas took power in a bloody coup"

That is a patent lie. As you damned well know Hamas won a clean election. So what did the US, Israel and Britain under Blair do?

Panicked that's what. To them it was an almost theological heresy that an Islamist government could also be a democratic one. So just as they have done in Somalia they caused trouble in order to destabilize that regime. Fatah was helped by Israel in its war with Hamas. The Israelis didn't want to ever truck with Fatah. So Hamas developed as an Palestinian response. Now Israel uses the very people it wouldn't deal with peacefully to cause disruption amongst the the Palestinians.

It wasn't Hamas that broke the ceasefire. Israel's 18 month blockade was an act of war done with the intention to both weaken Gaza and provoke it into providing Israel with the excuse it thought it needed in order to attack it.

You are aware, of course, that the Irgun, which played a prominent role in the formation of modern Israel was itself, a terrorist organization.

Of course, as well as the Stern Gang. They were terrorists, and they were suppressed by the Israeli establishment. The difference is that Hamas are terrorists, and they ARE the Palestinian establishment.

By the way, nice to speak with you again.

And as to your armchair psychology as to the "motivations" for people to support Israel, stick to legalisms, or take a class in cultural studies, biases and at least a rudimentary understanding of subjectivity and Kantian frameworks before you talk out of your ass.

The cheapest argument around is the fraud who claims his critics are slaves to their own personal biases while only he alone has achieved a superior logic system to see "The Truth."

We all have truths, Glenn.

This level of cheap dime-store psychology is the same nonsense that would call you the self-hating Jew, desperate to prove his bonafides to the goyim by trashing Israel, because he's working out personal issues.

It's not a compelling argument. Stick to facts.

Like the fact Israel placed a phone call trying to get the family of the Hamas leader out before they bombed. A fact you, naturally, don't cite, in your false equivalency linking the Israel attack to the mentality of terrorists to intentionally kill innocents.

That being said, your critiques of the right wing chicken-hawks are, as always, 100% accurate. They are bloodthursty, amoral disgraces. But their stupidity must be separated from the facts of the attack itself.

WinSmith

Do you have any emotional, cultural or religious attachments to Israel that make you see it as more than just another foreign country?

-- GlennGreenwald

Glenn, are you actually here in person this morning, or are you some sort of deranged AI computer program?

By the way, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the American Communist Party?

"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart."

"They are a terrorist organization whose goal is the total elimination of Israel.

Utter crap as you really damned well know.

"Gee. Were we supposed to just let those rockets continue to come down on us and not respond???"

I don't remember British people demanding of our government that in response to IRA bombs we should bomb the hell out of Ireland. Nor would you have heard the like from the Spanish when ETA was letting of bombs in Spain.

Your thinking is aggressive deceitful self pity. You want to occupy Gaza and get rid of those Arabs who live there. But you can't say that now can you?

lies in the simplest rule of conflicts between people. At a certain point the final determination always wends its way back to the fact that you end a war eitehr by conquering and subjugating its people or you remove the desire for warfare itself.

In practical terms this means you either present such a dominant military presence that you slaughter the target population on a genocidal scale in order to breed out the desire for armed dissent, or you impose such unquestionably dominant military force over that population's entire land for a generation or more to accomplish the same goal. Neither of these results are guaranteed success in the long term, and the latter scenario requires military commitment on a scale literally unsupportable by any nation currently residing on this planet.

This is the problem comprising the fundament of nearly every long-running conflict still ongoing, and is certainly the crux of the problem facing the United States (and to a lesser degree the West in its vs. MidEast war of cultures) and its proxy Israel in this interminable fight against Islam and its nation states.

The last century has been nothing if not a 100 year storybook, replete with illustrations, telling the tale of nations who have never, and will never, possess the means to carry out an objective of victory and/or peace through military means.

In that scenario the only real responsibility for the continuation of these conflicts as exemplified by Iraq and Palestine is with every citizen of the world who doesn't stand up and demand a sustainable diplomatic cessation of violence and resolution to these conflicts. The operative statement for every foreign policy tenet in every civilized nation on this planet should be that oft-neglected third option, namely to "remove the desire for warfare itself."

We have no choice but to remove the very problem Greenwald is elucidating; we need to make it impossible to view any other human being as The Other. Only through revolutionary diplomacy are we ever going to be able to construct the cultural agreements and mutual dependencies of the sort that will allow Israel to peaceably and productively exist side by side with its historical nemesis, or allow the United States to peaceably exist on this planet with any number of nations.

There is no frame, whether economic, social, or political, through which it does not make more sense on a simple cost/return basis to encourage worldwide peace and unfettered cultural interaction between peoples. If we are ever to do the adult thing and Learn Our Lesson it will require at least one nation taking the first step and declaring a repudiation of the entire modern history of pursuing diplomatic goals through warfare.