Comment Dated Mar 26, 2009

After trying to take on Hamas in 2006 and getting its nose solidly bloodied, and then seeing the proxies that it helped train get flattened by the Russians in Georgia, the Israeli Army finally found a worthy match in the form of Palestinian civilians and children--but only with the aid of tanks, artillery, jet fighters, helicopters, and remote-operated killer drones to even things up. When the slaughter was finally over, to frenzied celebrations and religious exhortations from the home front, the returning warriors commemorated their newly recovered manhood with T-shirts depicting such acts of valor as targeting a pregnant Palestinian woman, with the hilarious caption "1 shot 2 kills".

Another shows a picture of a child in the crosshairs, accompanied by the equally witty "The smaller they are, the harder it is." You get the drift.

Mark Glenn of American Free Press reports Israeli soldiers as admitting to the deliberate targeting of civilians, having been told that it was sanctioned by Biblical injunction and precedent.

The version officially put out by the US and Western media is that the Palestinians treacherously violated the cease-fire agreed to last year by firing a handful of toy rockets over the border (into what used to be their own homeland), and such retaliatory measures merely expressed Israel's right to defend itself. Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America, argues otherwise. As does Norman Finkelstein.

Why such determination to destroy the region's infrastrucure, rendering it unlivable, with the corollary of establishing uncontested control all the way to the coastline? To my knowledge, the discovery in 2000 of extensive gas fields off the coast of Gaza hasn't been widely publicized. Michael Chossudovsky at Global Research provides some interesting background. I suppose that could have something to do with it. Although Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes the case that the roots go far deeper.