Do you have any idea who is responsible for, who caused, those "relatiatory" attacks. You only hear that word used in the European and the Middle Eastern press. Israel felt it could kill Palestinians in the territories including Gaza, could starve and cause the death of over 290 medical patients, stop electricity and water to Gaza, and do it without impunity. Even Israel knows otherwise.

Every year B'Tselem reports that from 5-600 Palestinians are killed in the territories, more during 2006 when Israel attacked Gaza in operation Summer Rains under the cover of the Lebanon conflict. Most of the person killed are civilians and a quarter of those, like we are seeing today, are children.

Israel's military occupation and attempt to colonize the remainder of Palestinian lands is ultimately at the bottom of this strife. Bush offered a peace deal in 2007 but Israel brushed him off.

So give us a break. Want to condone the killing of 40 Palestinian children in a school, do so. But don't expect much concordance among the American people.

Do you have any idea who is responsible for, who caused, those "relatiatory" attacks. You only hear that word used in the European and the Middle Eastern press. Israel felt it could kill Palestinians in the territories including Gaza, could starve and cause the death of over 290 medical patients, stop electricity and water to Gaza, and do it without impunity. Even Israel knows otherwise.

Every year B'Tselem reports that from 5-600 Palestinians are killed in the territories, more during 2006 when Israel attacked Gaza in operation Summer Rains under the cover of the Lebanon conflict. Most of the person killed are civilians and a quarter of those, like we are seeing today, are children.

Israel's military occupation and attempt to colonize the remainder of Palestinian lands is ultimately at the bottom of this strife. Bush offered a peace deal in 2007 but Israel brushed him off.

So give us a break. Want to condone the killing of 40 Palestinian children in a school, do so. But don't expect much concordance among the American people.

Or perhaps if Israel hadn't blockaded Gaza, there would not have been rockets landing in Israeli towns.

Either way, 40 innocent people were killed in an attack on a U.N. structure today.

the past 40 years of military occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands.

Do you have any idea who is responsible for, who caused, those "relatiatory" attacks on Israel? You only hear that word used in the European and the Middle Eastern press. Israel felt it could kill Palestinians in the territories including Gaza, could starve and cause the death of over 290 medical patients, stop electricity and water to Gaza, and do it without impunity. Even Israel knows otherwise.

Every year B'Tselem reports that from 5-600 Palestinians are killed in the territories, more during 2006 when Israel attacked Gaza in operation Summer Rains under the cover of the Lebanon conflict. Most of the person killed are civilians and a quarter of those, like we are seeing today, are children.

Israel's military occupation and attempt to colonize the remainder of Palestinian lands is ultimately at the bottom of this strife. Bush offered a peace deal in 2007 but Israel brushed him off.

So give us a break. Want to condone the killing of 40 Palestinian children in a school, do so. But don't expect much concordance among the American people.

Or was it the Israelis shooting at hordes of rock-throwing men?  Or was it Hamas sending suicide bombers to civilian cafes?  Or was it Israelis missiles killing innocent civilians in an effort to take out a terrorist leader?  Or was it Palestinian militancy at being occupied?  Or was it illegal Isreali settlement building?  Or was it....?

Just take today's headline:  Israel kills 40 civilian refugees in a U.N.-run school.  Israel is clearly in the wrong.

Just take the headlines from a few weeks ago:  Hamas is firing rockets into Israeli towns.  Hamas was clearly in the wrong.

Why is it so hard to condemn Israeli actions?

Seems to me Israeli's are the terrorists who have occupied Palestinian territory:

"So, let's have a look at the official statistics of the Ottoman government, to see what the "empty land" of Palestine really looked like when the first Zionist settlers arrived there to pioneer their Jewish state.  The information I'm posting is from The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and The Mandate (Ch 1, Table 1.4D) by Prof Justin McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1990):

The year of the first aliya was 1299 (Muslim calendar), or 1881/2 of the Common Era.  And you can see at a glance that despite what you've been told, Palestine at that time was very far from being a land without a people.  In fact, there were 462,465 people living in Palestine: 403,795 Muslims; 43,659 Christians; 15,011 Jews.  In other words, Zionists were settling in a land where the pre-existing population was just 3.3 per cent Jewish, where a "Jewish state" could not possibly be established and maintained without the dispossession and disenfranchisement of those 96.7 per cent of the population that happen to have the "wrong" ethnic-religious origin, and where that dispossession would have to continue generation upon generation because of the majority population's ability to replenish itself through its high birthrate.
And suddenly, my comparison with the U.S., with its tiny Jewish minority of 2.5%, and the question of how most Americans would react to the imposition of a minority, sectarian state in their midst, doesn't seem so far-fetched after all.
Despite the endless propaganda we are subjected to, about Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) being people who are "not like us", whose values are inimical to our own, and with whom we are condemned to be engaged in an endless clash of civilizations, the conflict in Palestine is actually rooted in the fact that Palestinians are exactly like us.
Palestinians do not accept that equal citizenship in their own homeland should be denied them because of their ethnic/religious background, any more than Americans would accept ethnic justifications for denying them equal citizenship in the United States. Palestinians do not accept that a population that is 96.7% Muslim and Christian should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a sectarian Jewish state, any more than we would accept that the 97.5% of Americans who happen to be not-Jewish should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a Jewish state here.  In short, Palestinians reject and resist Zionism because they do not accept being treated in ways that we, likewise, would never accept for ourselves.
This is not difficult to understand. And yet we wrap the Arab-Israeli conflict in complex, ontological constructs about "The Arab Mind", about "Islamofascists" who "hate us for our freedoms", and about mindless, irrational anti-Semites who hate Israel just because it's Jewish and not because the overwhelmingly non-Jewish population there has to be destroyed in order to make it, and keep it, Jewish.  Complicated existential explanations to hide the simple fact that the Palestinians are doing exactly what we would be doing if we found ourselves in their situation.
I understand that if you're a Zionist you have a vested interest in not understanding all this, and in persuading others that it's really very complicated. But for the rest of us, really, how difficult is this to grasp?

nothing progressive- about sitting with ones thumb up their ass waiting on rockets to pour in daily.

what can i say, i have a soft spot for the underdog.

Mollusk could just as easily point to your comments as evidence for your lack of concern for Palestinian deaths.  

If Israel is killing civilians, it's killing civilians, regardless of whether the person who points it out cares about Hamas rockets.  Whataboutery is a rather transparent way to divert attention from inconvenient facts.

The Palestinians killed an Israeli soldier?  Ah snap, things are about to get really ugly.