For years, we have seen Israeli settlers killing Palestinians in the West Bank and taking their lands and we did nothing. The aid money and war equipment just kept flowing. I do not defend the heinous Hamas attack, but Israel left violence as the only option for Palestinians to defend their lands and try to prevent Israel from taking it all. Netanyahu’s public statement that Israel would annex the West Bank and open all of it to right-wing settlers may have been the impetus for Hamas to attack because with the Palestinians forced out of the West Bank any hope of a future state would be gone.
Some will say that Palestinians rejected statehood in the past. They were never offered statehood. They were offered negotiations to reach agreement with Israel, and Israel has always made demands that Palestinians could not accept. Netanyahu is on tape bragging that he deliberately blew up the Oslo Accords to prevent any Palestinian state and that he would never allow one. And this is the person that Israelis have chosen to lead them.
It’s long past time for the US and other nations to put conditions on our support of Israel and to help Palestinians build their own state. Hamas is a problem now, but killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian to kill a few thousand Hamas fighters is not acceptable. Israel has some of the best spyware and intelligence operations in the world. They know that the top leaders of Hamas are not even in Gaza. They could track the funding of Hamas and cut it off. They could identify how Hamas is getting weapons into Gaza and work with countries like Egypt to shut the smuggling down. Israel has other options than murdering many thousands of Palestinians and bombing their homes to leave nothing but rubble in Gaza. At the moment, though, it appears that they prefer killing as many Palestinians as possible.
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