Israel-Gaza conflict: What has Israel achieved in 26 bloody days?

[Boiler 48,108]

Different religion?

[GandD 5,966]

*blam* you are now all-powerful king of Israel and can pass any law or make any changes you would like..

Imagine having your news conference and announcing that "we are all now Israelis and this is all now Israel." - What do you think is going to happen? Play out the scenario...

ich bin ein berliner?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

ich bin ein berliner?

mmmh, ein Berliner.

[Boiler 48,108]

Not kosher?

[GandD 5,966]

mmmh, ein Berliner.

This guy gets it.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

Kennedy never looked better

[GandD 5,966]

[Póg mo 1,749]

Different religion?

Well the Scots and welsh are for the most part the same religion, but aren't considered the same for some strange reason.

[Boiler 48,108]

Well the Scots and welsh are for the most part the same religion, but aren't considered the same for some strange reason.

Eglwys yng Nghymru

Not even the same language.

I thought Egypt/Gaza were all or mostly Sunni's.

[OriZ 3,165]

If this is your occupiers official stance, and the international community in spite of NUMEROUS efforts has not been able to dislodge your occupiers from the territories that they have "annexed", then I guess physically throwing them off is your last option isn't it?

Ignoring the international community and continuing to expand certainly invites self-defense from those displaced but killing the people you displaced to maintain expansion into territory owned by them doesn't even approach the radar screen of "self defense".

Not one single square foot of the territories discussed under the Hamas demand is territory that the international community recognizes a right for Israel to hold, build on, settle on, or "defend".

Defending stolen property isn't noble anywhere on the planet. Jewish or not.

Israel dismantled 18 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, and all 21 in the Gaza Strip and 4 in the West Bank in 2005, but continues to both expand its settlements and settle new areas in the West Bank, despite being condemned by 158 out of 166 nations in one vote, and 160 nations out of 171 nations in a different vote, in the UN

The international community considers the settlements in occupied territory to be illegal,^[9] and the United Nations has repeatedly upheld the view that Israel's construction of settlements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and communities in the Golan Heights, areas which have been annexed by Israel, are also considered settlements by the international community, which does not recognise Israel's annexations of these territories.The International Court of Justice also says these settlements are illegal in a 2004 advisory opinion. In April 2012, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, in response to moves by Israel to legalise Israeli outposts, reiterated that all settlement activity is illegal, and "runs contrary to Israel's obligations under the Road Map and repeated Quartet calls for the parties to refrain from provocations." Similar criticism was advanced by the EU and the US.

Israel disputes the position of the international community and the legal arguments that were used to declare the settlements illegal.

You are yet again wrong about Hamas. Why was Hamas created? It was not for the west bank and gaza. The Hamas Charter states that "our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious" and calls for the eventual creation of an Islamic state in Palestine, in place of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel. The charter also states that Hamas is humanistic, and tolerant of other religions as long as they "stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region". The Charter adds that "renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion" of Islam.

In the late 1980s, the PLO sought a negotiated solution with Israel in the form of a two-state solution. This was not acceptable to Hamas, and the covenant was written to bridge the ideological gap between the PLO and Muslim Brotherhood. Meaning - Hamas did not get established BECAUSE of the occupation and LACK of negotiations, rather, because they were opposed to Israel and the PLO negotiating, which is also why the late 90's and early 2000's when negotiations were in high gear saw dozens of suicide attacks killing over 1,000 Israelis just in order to get the peace process to end.

The Hamas Charter reads like a modern-day 'Mein Kampf.'" According to the charter, Jewish people "have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world. The charter claims that the Jews deserve God’s/Allah’s enmity and wrath because they received the Scriptures but violated its sacred texts, disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew their own prophets. "The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews."(related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)

The charter contains references to anti-semitic canards, such as the assertion that through shrewd manipulation of imperial countries and secret societies, Jews were behind a wide range of events and disasters going as far back in history as the French Revolution. The document also quotes Islamic religious texts to provide justification for fighting against and killing the Jews, without distinction of whether they are in Israel or elsewhere. It presents the Arab Israeli conflict as an inherently irreconcilable struggle between Jews and Muslims, and Judaism and Islam, adding that the only way to engage in this struggle between "truth and falsehood" is through Islam and by means of jihad, until victory or martyrdom.

An Israeli reporter met with Ahmed Yassin(one of Hamas' founders) in 1988 -

Do you see a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living side by side in the peaceful coexistence?

No. Such a solution can exist only temporarily. These two countries will endure side by side for a short time. Then resume the conflict even more. The Palestinian people will rebel again and again. Palestine is a holy place for Jews, Christians and Muslims so the only solution is that all these religions live together in one country.

You mean an Islamic state in which Jews and Christian citizens will be tolerated? "I personally prefer, Islam will rule this country and it will be Islamic., I'll offer people accept Islam as dominant in their new state law but will not force it on them. Whether the majority will refuse to accept the Sharia, I'll accept it."

In the conversation that developed after the interview you could understand that the intent of Sheik Yassin, a Palestinian Islamic state, would also includ Jordan which would guarantee a large and stable Muslim majority. Hence the democratic generosity he shows, does not constitute for Sheikh ideological deviation.

What do you think of autonomy in the territories? "Negative. Practical implications of autonomy is, Jews have it all and Palestinians will have nothing."

How about a unilateral withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories? "It would be an act of madness on your part, if you do such a thing without early security arrangements. At Least you should make sure there's presence of a UN force in the territories before you leave. If you leave without such security arrangements - your safety will be at risk.

The Sheik does not say so explicitly, but clearly, the possibility of an Israeli withdrawal unilaterally is the most frightenning possibility to him because of the expected internal bloodbath between the various Palestinian factions. He also believes that this bloodbath will slide even going to Israel in the form of terrorism.

So even Yassin thought it would be an act of maddness, yet Israel did it in Gaza and that is exactly what happened.

Yassin opposed the peace process between the Palestinians and Israel. He supported armed resistance against Israel, and was very outspoken in his views. He asserted that Palestine is an Islamic land "consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day" and that no Arab leader had the right to give up any part of this territory. Yassin's rhetoric did not distinguish between Israelis and Jews, at one point stating that "Reconciliation with the Jews is a crime." Yassin's inflammatory rhetoric was often scrutinized in the news media. On one occasion, he opined that Israel "must disappear from the map". Yassin's declaration that "We chose this road, and will end with martyrdom or victory" later became an oft repeated mantra among Palestinians.

Some more about Yassin and Hamas:

“DEATH threats do not frighten us, we are in search of martyrdom,” declared Sheikh Ahmed Yassin a couple of months ago after Israel's deputy defence minister had named him “marked for death”. Before his own “martyrdom” came about on Monday—he was killed by missiles fired from Israeli helicopters as he emerged in his wheelchair from dawn prayers in Gaza City—the frail, half-blind, quadriplegic man of God had inspired many young Palestinians to strap explosives to their bodies and blow up themselves, and as many Israelis as they could muster, in the name of that martyrdom.

Suicide bombs, Sheikh Yassin would have argued, are the weapons of the weak; the Palestinians' counter to Israel's tanks. He never wavered in his belief that the “armed struggle” was the only way to get Israel out of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, he believed killing innocent Israeli civilians was justified by the deaths of innocent Palestinians in Israeli raids, and he would never, probably, have been able to bring himself to recognise the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Hamas is a radical Islamist party that is quite willing to use terror as a means of persuasion. By these standards, the sheikh's was reckoned to be a relatively pragmatic voice.

Israeli leaders, intent on crushing Hamas before Israel's possible withdrawal from Gaza, have suggested that the sheikh, the “mastermind of Palestinian terror”, enjoyed an irreplaceable position in the Islamist organisation. Up to a point, that is true: he did have huge and probably irreplaceable moral, or immoral, authority. But he did not have sole authority. Hamas is multi-faceted, with political factions inside (Gaza and the West Bank) and outside (now in Beirut or Damascus), a faction inside Israel's prisons, and its formidable, partly autonomous, military wing. Sheikh Yassin tended to speak for the consensus.

Related items

• Israel and Palestine: Has the death of the sheikh really changed anything?Mar 25th 2004
• Israel and Palestine: Don't give up hopeMar 25th 2004
• Yassin’s returnOct 9th 1997

Related topics

• Politics
• Israeli politics
• Middle East politics
• World politics
• Government and politics

No religious scholar, his authority derived from a number of sources. History had a lot to do with it. Born in what is now Israel, his youth was spent in a Gaza refugee camp, where he had the accident that paralysed him. After studying in Egypt, he led the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, setting up an Islamic Centre that came to control all the Islamic institutions in Gaza, including the university. Then in the late 1980s, when the first intifada or uprising had started, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Islamic Resistance Movement—of which Hamas, which also means “zeal”, is the acronym.

His way of life appealed. In blazing contrast to the extravagant and often corrupt leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), he lived modestly, raising vast sums for his education and welfare charities and, no doubt, for weapons too. The father of 11 children, he endeared himself to his impoverished people by not demanding special privileges for them. And even after the death threats, and an attempt to kill him last year, he lived in his own house with just one security guard.

His triumphant return home from prison in 1997 was followed by a hardly less triumphant tour of Arab capitals. A couple of decades earlier, some Israeli leaders had looked kindly on the Muslim Brotherhood's representatives in the occupied territory as counters to the secular PLO. But the sheikh was packed off twice to Israeli prisons, and might well have been there still, alive on a life sentence, if Israel had not had to free him, after eight years, in an embarrassed deal caused by a botched assassination attempt.

The sheikh also had a brief stint in an Egyptian jail, and has been threatened with house arrest by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Mr Arafat, who declared three days of mourning for the sheikh, is under constant pressure from Israel and elsewhere to round up Hamas activists. He couldn't do so, not least because Hamas has as much support as Mr Arafat's own Fatah party: in opinion polls, they each have about a quarter of the votes.

Sheikh Yassin was one of the voices in Hamas that tried to avoid an open split with Mr Arafat. Though he criticised policy and strategy, he never challenged Mr Arafat's leadership of the Palestinian people. He did not want Hamas to be part of an Arafat-led government, but in conversation he sometimes seemed to envisage a future role as a loyal opposition.

An offer they can refuse

Hamas stridently opposed the two-state solution that was the basis of the Oslo accords, and many of its members still speak of the Jewish state in blood-curdling terms. But there has been a sea-change that Sheikh Yassin cautiously encouraged, and sometimes reflected. It amounts roughly to this: if Israel were to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, fulfilling all the conditions Palestinians demand, the armed struggle to get back the rest of the Mandate of Palestine would be suspended—though the right of future generations to resume it would not be denied.

The Israelis, quite reasonably, snort at such a loaded half-offer. Why have a truce that allows the other side to prepare for battle, they ask? Still, it is probably the closest that Hamas, with Sheikh Yassin at its head, would have gone in formally recognising Israel's rights. Without him, the movement is unlikely to go that far: his successors are thought to be more “radical” than he was.

http://www.economist.com/node/2536004

And here's some more libel from Hamas against Jews from just a few days ago. Funny how on American TV they always pretend to be so peaceful, but when they speak on their own networks, in their own language, they say completely different things. This is how they lie to people, how they brainwash people, along with the pallywood photos and all the other lies. That's how you make everyone hate Israel and feel sorry for Hamas.

Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan has been making infrequent appearances on CNN in the past few weeks, but today Wolf Blitzer really held his feet to the fire. At issue here was what Blitzer called “disturbing” comments Hamdan made on television saying that Jews use Christian blood to make matzoh, a charge generally referred to as blood libel.

Hamdan had said, “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood in their holy matzoh. This is not a figment of the imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact acknowledged by their own books and historical evidence.”

Blitzer confronted Hamdan over that remark today. Hamdan, repeatedly, refused to directly answer Blitzer’s question. Instead, he argued that the truly disgusting rhetoric is coming from the Israelis. Hamdan told Blitzer, “They are misusing the words. I’ve said on the same occasion that we don’t have problems with the Jews… I have Jewish friends who are supporting the Palestinian rights.”

At no point did Hamdan address those controversial remarks themselves. But what Blitzer noticed is that not once did Hamdan issue any kind of denial for uttering such “an awful, awful smear.”

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/wolf-blitzer-confronts-hamas-spox-for-his-disturbing-blood-libel-remarks/

The above sums it up. The Israeli govt. and it's supporters in the U.S. have done a great job of guilting people so that if they don't fully support Israel, then they're anti-semitic Nazis. On the flip side, if they have any sympathy for the Palestinian people, then they support Islamic terrorists.

Hopefully people in the U.S. are becoming a little more educated on the subject and realize it has little to do with religion, and has more to do with one country's quest to acquire land illegally, while punishing it's inhabitants at the same time.

I say Israel should annex it all. Gaza and the west bank, and give all it's inhabitants Israeli citizenship and the right to vote. That's how we do things in the U.S. One man, one vote.

I'd guess Netanyahu/Likud wouldn't be winning any elections, or probably any Jewish person for that matter, which is exactly why they would never do that. It seems things are somewhat stable in the west bank in comparison to Gaza. Israel should dismantle their illegal settlements, build their wall on the 1967 border, and let the Palestinians run the show in the west bank. Let them actually collect taxes and duties like all other countries do (instead of holding them hostage) I'd hope it would be a success. That'll never happen though, because Israel wont remove the illegal settlements.

As it is now, Israel is trying to have it both ways. Maintain control of the Palestinians, while not giving them any rights. And they wonder why folks are unhappy about that.

Neither is going to happen at this point and I've already explained why. The one state solution - not enough trust exists on either side, the two state solution - in negotiations sure, not unilaterally again. Israel tried that with Gaza and look what happened. Without having security arrangements - as even Yassin suggested, Israel could never get out of the west bank. If, however, it could make sure whether by security measures for the first few years after an agreement(which the Palestinians so far have opposed), or by certain international guarantees, or both, that what happened in Gaza will not repeat itself in the west bank, then I'm sure there would be lots to talk about.

Edited August 7, 2014 by OriZ

[OriZ 3,165]

If anyone wants to know the truth about Hamas, it’s right in front of them.

Just go directly to the source. What Hamas says about itself is far more damning than anything its opponents could say about it.

The first primer is of course to read the Hamas charter and see how being a fanatical religious terrorist organization that explicitly rejects all forms of international peace deals in an attempt to eradicate Israel is their entire reason for existence.

Appearing on CNN the other day, Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan was asked if they’d remove the following words from the charter: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or tree.”

Hamdan never directly answered the question.

While in Gaza the other day, Israeli Defense Forces discovered a Hamas manual on “Urban Warfare."

Here are a couple quotes: “The soldiers and commanders (of the IDF) must limit their use of weapons and tactics that lead to the harm and unnecessary loss of people and [destruction of] civilian facilities. It is difficult for them to get the most use out of their firearms, especially of supporting fire [e.g. artillery].”

And this: “The destruction of civilian homes: This increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers [the IDF] and increases their gathering [support] around the city defenders (resistance forces [i.e. Hamas]).”

They seem content to watch the homes of their people bombed if it gives them a tactical advantage.

There’s a term for this: nihilism. Then again the Hamas charter proves this, stating “death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.”

But some will argue the IDF is not a trustworthy source. Don't care for it? Then on to the next piece of damning news:

Mosab Hassan Yousef was born in Ramallah to one of Hamas’ founders and aspired to be a Hamas fighter until he defected to Israel as an informant in 1997. He now lives in the United States.

Last week he appeared on Fox News and said while peace between Israel and the Palestinians is indeed possible, peace between Israel and Hamas is not.

“The only way, I believe, to fight an organization like Hamas is to unmask them by exposing their ideology,” Yousef said. “Hamas is not a political party. It’s not even a Palestinian organization… Hamas does not care for the lives of Palestinians… They want the children of Gaza to die. This is what gives them Arab and Islamic world sympathy and this is what will condemn Israel internationally. This is their game and they’re happy about it."

Mosab Hassan Yousef is clearly treated by many in the “see no evil, hear no evil” crowd the same way they treat Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Ignore him. Pretend he doesn’t exist.

They are the truth tellers in an age in which truth is the least traded commodity.

So once again: Hold Israel to the highest standard. Demand they minimize civilian casualties. Demand they get humanitarian aid across to the people of Gaza (yes, even those same people who voted for Hamas in 2006).

If and when Hamas is gone, #######-for-tat skirmishes over land and settlements will no doubt unfortunately continue. Resume that debate then.

But right now have no delusions about the group Israel is battling and what it represents

http://www.torontosun.com/2014/08/05/more-truths-about-hamas

[Póg mo 1,749]

Eglwys yng Nghymru

Not even the same language.

I thought Egypt/Gaza were all or mostly Sunni's.

That's funny, I was under the impression that the Scots and Welsh spoke different forms of Gaelic, and having a sister who speaks Irish fluently, I am also under the impression that speakers of either one of these languages, are able to a degree communicate with each other.

[Boiler 48,108]

They are Celtic. But very different.

[Póg mo 1,749]

They are Celtic. But very different.

At any rate the idea that just because you share a common language and religion, somehow means that you are precluded from forming a separate country is a little odd. This did not stop the Australians, Americans, newzelanders, south Africans etc from becoming separate countries.

[OriZ 3,165]

In the spring of 2009, Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist, surprised some of his readers by claiming that Iran’s remaining Jews were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility.”

Cohen wrote: “Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran—its sophistication and culture—than all the inflammatory rhetoric.”

Perhaps.

In this, and other, columns, Cohen appeared to be trying to convince his fellow Jews that they had less to fear from the Iran of Khamenei and (at the time) Ahmadinejad than they thought. To me, the column was a whitewash. It seemed (and seems) reasonable to worry about the intentions of those Iranian leaders who deny or minimize the Holocaust while hoping to annihilate the Jewish state, and who have funded and trained groups—Hezbollah and Hamas—that have as their goal the killing of Jews.

It is a dereliction of responsibility not to try to understand the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements.

Cohen’s most acid critics came from within the Persian Jewish exile community. The vast majority of Iran’s Jews fled the country after the Khomeini revolution; many found refuge in Los Angeles. David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple there, invited Cohen to speak to his congregants, about half of whom are Persian exiles, shortly after the column appeared. Cohen, to his credit, accepted the invitation. The encounter between Cohen and an audience of several hundred (mainly Jews, but also Bahais, members of a faith persecuted with great intensity by the Iranian regime) was tense but mainly civil (you can watch it here). For me, the most interesting moment came not in a discussion about the dubious health of Iran’s remnant Jewish population, but after Wolpe asked Cohen about the intentions of Iran and its allies toward Jews living outside Iran.

“Right now,” Wolpe said, “Israel is much more powerful than Hezbollah and Hamas. Let’s say tomorrow this was reversed. Let’s say Hamas had the firepower of Israel and Israel had the firepower of Hamas. What do you think would happen to Israel were the balance of power reversed?”

“I don’t know what would happen tomorrow,” Cohen answered. This response brought a measure of derisive laughter from the incredulous audience. “And it doesn’t matter that I don’t know because it’s not going to happen tomorrow or in one or two years.” Wolpe quickly told Cohen that he himself knows exactly what would happen if the power balance between Hamas and Israel were to be reversed. (Later, Wolpe told me that he thought Cohen could not have been so naïve as to misunderstand the nature of Hamas and Hezbollah, but instead was simply caught short by the question.)

At the time, Cohen suggested that he was uninterested in grappling with the nature of Hamas and its goals. “I reject the thinking behind your question,” he said. “It’s not useful to go there.”

“Going there,” however, is necessary, not only to understand why Israelis fear Hamas, but also to understand that the narrative advanced by Hamas apologists concerning the group's beliefs and goals is false. “Going there” also does not require enormous imagination, or a well-developed predisposition toward paranoia. It is, in my opinion, a dereliction of responsibility on the part of progressives not to try to understand the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements.

(This post, you should know, is not a commentary on the particulars of the war between Israel and Hamas, a war in which Hamas baited Israel and Israel took the bait. Each time Israel kills an innocent Palestinian in its attempt to neutralize Hamas’s rockets, it represents a victory for Hamas, which has made plain its goal of getting Israel to kill innocent Gazans. Suffice it to say that Israel cannot afford many more “victories” of the sort it is seeking in Gaza right now. I supported a ceasefire early in this war precisely because I believed that the Israeli government had not thought through its strategic goals, or the methods for achieving those goals.)

While it is true that Hamas is expert at getting innocent Palestinians killed, it has made it very plain, in word and deed, that it would rather kill Jews. The following blood-freezing statement is from the group's charter: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

While Hamas is expert at getting innocent Palestinians killed, it has made clear that it would rather kill Jews.

This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you'll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not many people seem to know that Hamas’s founding document is genocidal. Sometimes, the reasons for this lack of knowledge are benign; other times, as the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch argues in his recent dismantling of Rashid Khalidi’s apologia for Hamas, this ignorance is a direct byproduct of a decision to mask evidence of Hamas’s innate theocratic fascism.

The historian of totalitarianism Jeffrey Herf, in an article on the American Interest website, places the Hamas charter in context:

[T]he Hamas Covenant of 1988 notably replaced the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy theory of world politics with the classic anti-Semitic tropes of Nazism and European fascism, which the Islamists had absorbed when they collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That influence is apparent in Article 22, which asserts that “supportive forces behind the enemy” have amassed great wealth: "With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. With their money, they took control of the world media. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there."

The above paragraph of Article 22 could have been taken, almost word for word, from Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda texts and broadcasts.

The question Roger Cohen refused to answer at Sinai Temple was addressed in a recent post by Sam Harris, the atheist intellectual, who is opposed, as a matter of ideology, to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (or to any country organized around a religion), but who for practical reasons supports its continued existence as a haven for an especially persecuted people, and also as a not-particularly religious redoubt in a region of the world deeply affected by religious fundamentalism. Referring not only to the Hamas charter, Harris writes that, “The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking.”

Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it

should

have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.

And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. ...

What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas.

The first time I witnessed Hamas’s hatred of Jews manifest itself in large-scale, fatal violence was in late July of 1997, when two of the group’s suicide bombers detonated themselves in an open-air market in West Jerusalem. The attack took 16 lives, and injured 178. I happened to be only a few blocks from the market at the time of the attack, and arrived shortly after the paramedics and firefighters. Over the next hours, a scene unfolded that I would see again and again: screaming relatives; members of the Orthodox burial society scraping flesh off walls; the ground covered in blood and viscera. I remember another Hamas attack, on a bus in downtown Jerusalem, in which body parts of children were blown into the street by the force of the blast. At yet another bombing, I was with rescue workers as they recovered a human arm stuck high up in a tree.

After each of these attacks, Hamas leaders issued blood-curdling statements claiming credit, and promising more death. “The Jews will lose because they crave life but a true Muslim loves death,” a former Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, told me in an interview in 2002. In the same interview he made the following imperishable statement: “People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, ‘What did the Jews do to the Germans?’”

I will always remember this interview not only because Rantisi's Judeophobia was breathtaking, but because just as I was leaving his apartment in Gaza City, a friend from Jerusalem called to tell me that she had just heard a massive explosion outside her office at the Hebrew University (not far, by the way, froman attack earlier today). A cafeteria had just been bombed, my friend told me. This was another Hamas operation, one which killed nine people, including a young woman of exceptional promise named Marla Bennett, a 24-year-old American student who wrote shortly before her death, “My friends and family in San Diego ask me to come home, it is dangerous here. I appreciate their concern. But there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be right now. I have a front-row seat for the history of the Jewish people.”

Hamas is an organization devoted to ending Jewish history. This is what so many Jews understand, and what so many non-Jews don’t. The novelist Amos Oz, who has led Israel's left-wing peace camp for decades, said in an interview last week that he doesn't see a prospect for compromise between Israel and Hamas. "I have been a man of compromise all my life," Oz said. "But even a man of compromise cannot approach Hamas and say: 'Maybe we meet halfway and Israel only exists on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.'"

In the years since it adopted its charter, Hamas leaders and spokesmen have reinforced its message again and again. Mahmoud Zahar said in 2006 that the group "will not change a single word in its covenant." To underscore the point, in 2010 Zahhar said, "Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy."

In 2011, the former Hamas minister of culture, Atallah Abu al-Subh, said that "the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah. Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world." Just last week, a top Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, accused Jews of using Christian blood to make matzo. This is not a group, in other words, that is seeking the sort of peace that Amos Oz—or, for that matter, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—is seeking. People wonder why Israelis have such a visceral reaction to Hamas. The answer is easy. Israel is a small country, and most of its citizens know someone who was murdered by Hamas in its extended suicide-bombing campaigns; and most people also understand that if Hamas had its way, it would kill them as well.