Israel Is A Terrorist State: Turkey PM

[regnaD kciN]

57. The funny thing about causality...

...is how it can change according to your point-of-view. From an article by Israeli activist Uri Avnery:

HOW DID it start? Stupid question.

Conflagrations along the Gaza Strip don’t start. They are just a continuous chain of events, each claimed to be in “retaliation” for the previous one. Action is followed by reaction, which is followed by retaliation, which is followed by …

This particular event “started” with the firing from Gaza of an anti-tank weapon at a partially armored jeep on the Israeli side of the border fence. It was described as retaliation for the killing of a boy in an air attack some days earlier. But probably the timing of the action was accidental – the opportunity just presented itself.

The problem here is that it's all-too-easy for proponents of one side or the other to create a scenario where it's always the other side that's the original inciter, and where one's own side is always "acting in self-defense." Thus, from the pro-Israeli viewpoint most common in the U.S., and which you have expressed above, everything was going just fine in Gaza (ignoring the decades of oppression caused by the Israeli occupation, and intensified in recent years) until Hamas, stirred by nothing other than inherent hatred of Jews, decided to launch unprovoked rocket attacks. In other parts of the world, I'm sure, the viewpoint is that the starting point is always Israeli oppression, ignoring the Arab military threats and homegrown terror attacks that made Israelis conclude that their opponents wouldn't be satisfied until Israel had been "driven into the sea." In either case, one's own side is always right, the other side is always pure evil, and everything one's own side does is "self-defense"...and thus everything is permissible.

As far as I'm concerned, the only way forward is for each side to abandon their claim to pure innocence, admit that the other side has legitimate claims as well, and work toward a fair solution based on that assumption. Until that happens, though, we should probably expect atrocity upon atrocity upon atrocity in the future, with each justified as "defending ourselves," and insisting that everything would be fine if it wasn't for the other side's malevolence and aggression.