I fucking hate politics sometimes....

A moral question:-

Consider a man is being beaten. Brutally. His assailant is the brother of the first man girlfriend who has been beaten in turn by him (man 1). Man 2 rains down fists and blows, the air is full of the crack of bone and blood marbles the pavement. The violence and the hatred is shocking, man 1 is near death. You see the girlfriend/sister. Her face is a mass of black and purple flesh, her lips swollen, bruises cover her arms, her posture betraying animal-like injury. Man 1 merely repeats under the blows, 'I'll kill her, i'll kill her, once you stop i'll kill her'.

Violence and the ruthless will to use it create such scenes, such 'choices'. It may be a fanciful and distasteful metaphor (and I apologise whole-heatedly if that is true) but it is how I feel. The last two weeks have seen such a hopeless and bloody choice unravel. Hamas broke a brief ceasefire and began bombarding randomly the south of Israel. Israel in turn began attacking Hamas targets in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people were now subsumed by panic. Israeli Children rushed into bomb shelters. Palestinian families were killed together as their houses were bombed. Israel jets and helicopters fired, Hamas rockets were lauched in hopes of killing Jews. Death and misery begat 2009.

I have written before on the I/P conflict. Once on the tripartite nature of the problems, the other on the intensity of anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian franchise, Hamas. My thoughts on the I/P conflict have changed over the years. Originally I saw the simple, clear cut narrative of a great Israel Goliath versus a feeble Palestinian David. It was 'pleasing', it required little thought and less analysis. The hopes of Camp David and Oslo seemed at least to place it on a civil path, one where justice for the Palestinians might be found without dead bodies and mourning families.

Initially I saw the Al-Aqsa Intifada though the old lens. Sharon had started it, it was natural reactions to repression etc. Then Jenin or 'Jenin-grad' in Arafat's worlds, then the suicide bombing, every few days, 10 dead, 5 dead, 30 dead, then the aerial bombings, 100 dead, 120 dead. The hopes had gone, but so had the simplicity. So much of the pleasing dichotomy fell apart. The PLO, instead of making a success out of the little statelet, using the legitimacy of the small and peaceful, mired itself in corruption and cosying up to the Islamists. Hamas launched a war not against corrupt officials and the undeveloped economy, but the Jews, knowing full well they could not win, that their 'people' would suffer. The elites who so wretched the heart over the suffering of the Palestinian piled more and more on top. They seemed to be sacred of governing, of actually making a Palestinian state. Israel might trespass, might be brutal, but did that mean sending young men to kill innocents waiting for a Pizza or kids coming out of their seminary.

The more I learned, the more I realised that Hamas, the 'zeal' of the Palestinian resistance, cared less than anyone about their 'people'. The more I learn, the more I saw similarities betwixt them and other extremist groups, other gangs who claimed that they sought the best for their particular narod, volk or ummah and send them in their multitude to die.

So when I look at the photo above, my heart breaks, I cannot see where it ends, when these endless and infinite tragedies stop. Then through gritted teeth, I will say 'this is your work, Yassin, this is your doing, Haniyah, this is the sum of your thoughts and actions, your people killed, at your bequest, by the 'Jew''. They have created this situation, with their calls to kill and be killed, by twenty years of worshipping blood. Much as there is to be disgusted at by Israel's history, this is the work of Hamas.