Hamas won with 43% of the vote. Not exactly a landslide. Further, Before they won, was Fatah effective at preventing Hamas militants from launching rockets? Or the slightest bit effective at governing? Palestine is basically a failed state, it has no economy independent from Israel, which is why the current blockade is killing them.

So, when you live in a failed state, and it's time to go to the polls, your choices are limited. How do you make things better? I really don't know. The choice between Fatah and Hamas was a choice of who would be awful and who would be worse.

By surrendering in WW2, Japan got it's civil life back. But civil life sucks in blockaded Gaza. Is it worth having back? If Israel ends its siege, life in Gaza will still be creating a lot of discontent.

and for all these years I had thought that David Brooks was the token neocon at the NYT. Friedman and Kristol can now lay claim to that mantle. Brooks is actually sounding less and less like a neocon every day while Friedman has been moving in the opposite direction since 2000, save for his obsession with a green revolution.

I find your theory that Israel creates terrorists deliberately to be a stretch. However, there is no denying that, as a state, Israel accepts the creation of future terrorists as an acceptable risk, and has done so for decades.

I think, as Fly-By Pharisee basically said below, a viable solution would be for the refugees of Gaza to bow their heads and accept slavery as their fate.

Then the abuse of Palestinians would be less visible---although perhaps, paradoxically, world opinion is more sympathetic to completely subjugated peoples (see Africa, South) than to those who still have some fight left in them.

So maybe you have a point.

It just amazes me how people like Tom Friedman can be so openly blatant with their blood lust and disregard for human life, but yet it seems they hardly ever get criticized or called to account for it. But you really know things are bad, when Bush's top administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial, Judge Susan Crawford, concludes publicly that the US military's actions in Guantanamo meet " the legal definition of torture", and yet again it seems no one is going to do anything about it.

This is perhaps the biggest lie to come out of this whole thing, and it makes me want to scream when I hear it.

Since the six-month ceasefire was implemented, Hamas rocket attacks into Israel had gone down SIGNIFICANTLY. What was

Israel supposed to do in return for Hamas' ceasefire? Lift the economic STRANGLEHOLD that it had Palestinian CIVILIANS in. It did no such thing. These people have no livelihood, no means of trade, limited medical equipment, no supplies, no schools, are starving and have nowhere to go.

Who do you think this economic blockade targets? Hamas? NO. It targets CIVILIANS.

And now, these airstrikes and ground invasions have killed over 900 people, of which at LEAST a quarter are civilians and CHILDREN, according to the UN.

Yet, people still insist that Israel is not targeting civilians. That is equivalent to me killing my neighbor in cold blood, and then insisting that I only meant to torch his house. He wasn't SUPPOSED to die.

It's such unbelievable BS it almost makes me laugh.

I'm getting so tired of the Newspeak. IDF? That's the army. And an army does more than defend itself.

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon;

the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre;

the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base;

the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew;

the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

- Robert Fisk: "Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask." http://tinyurl.com/7bgujt

"Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." Moshe Yalon, Israeli army chief, 2002.

"When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." Prof. Arnon Soffer, Israeli architect of the 2005 Gaza disengagement.

After years of Tom Friedman championing unregulated financial markets, globalism and Chicago School/Milton Friedmanesque economics, the financial fortunes of the world generally, and the US in particular, having scrupulously followed the Friedman line, now lie in smoldering ruins. His own wife's family fortune, built on the reckless rapaciousness of that ideology, has plunged from $25Billion to bankruptcy. So much for his much vaunted expertise in matters economic.

His flabbily machismo 'Suck.On.This' rhetoric on Iraq proved similarly, spectacularly, un-prescient. As the rationales for invasion were gradually disproven (No WMD, no al-Qeda connection, no welcome as liberators, no democracy-domino effect etc.,) Friedman was reduced to his now famously discredited Friedman Units ("In 6 months things will be...uh...less hellish). After dozens of these FUs and with Iraq, still, even now, in ruins even worse than the US economy, (hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced) his much vaunted expertise in matters geoplitic compounds regional/global disaster with gore-splattered crimes against humanity.

Now, having enabled and cheerled the worst financial global crisis and the worst foreign policy decision in living memory, he turns his Medusa-like gaze to the most intractable conflict on the planet. Contrary to every military and strategic expert in the world on counterterrorism, Friedman sagely reassures us that the slaughter of innocents is actually, shrewdly, educational. On the morning after the morning after their collective punishment, the families and neighbours of those who were murdered, won't blame their murderers, they'll blame those who fought against them, who they elected, who have provided the only social services for their community.

If that seems remotely plausible to anyone, I've got some sub-prime mortgages and condos in Florida just waiting for your credulous signature...