What many fail to see, or don't want to see, or try to see around, is that Israel isn't fighting Palestine. Israel is fighting the Arab world. Israel is fighting Islam, and unlike us, they're fighting not just for peace of mind, but for survival. There is nothing new about this concept. People have observed, quite accurately, since the inception of the Israeli state that they are surrounded by enemies. It's a fact that never becomes any less true even after being repeated a billion times. It's the Arab world verses a tiny chunk of land, in habited by a tiny segment of the regional population. Palestine is simply a very convenient fulcrum over which the whole of the arab world can leverage their politcal ambitions in regards to the Jews.
I am a Jew, so I'm baised. I'm also a Russian Jew and have family and friends living in Israel. I've been there, during better times, and have seen the way these people live day to day. I've also seen the amazing job these peolpe have done with their land, turning the barren desert into viable farmland, building beautiful cities in areas so plagued by conflict you'd wonder how any structure has survived more than a decade. Their accomplishments, not to mention millenia of Israelite history, has earned them to the right to keep that land. I don't give a flying F what people say about displaced Palestinians... If we return everything that was given away during geo-political displacements, the US would effectively have to be depopulated of a quarter billion people to facilitate the Native American revival. Things change, history moves on, more worthy, yes more WORTHY people move in to where little or nothing of worth was taking place. It's sad but it's true. Progress and change produce casualties of their own. I submit that the Israelis, in their ingenuity, in their industriousness, in their capacity to create that which is good for all the world's people, represent some of the best of what humanity has to offer. Can this be said of any other soveriegnty in the middle east?
The Israelis are waging a war of survival. The survival in question is that of a small but determined race of people that despite a history or hatred and oppression, has never given up, never laid down under the boot and likely never will. They continue to survive, every day, in conditions most people would consider uncomfortable simply by virtue of the climate, and against overwhelming odds brought on by an entire region that despises them to the core. Their enemy is backwards, fanatically religious in the biblical sense of the term, unforgiving, illogical and bigger by a factor of twenty.
This assasination, and any that came before it and all that will come after is the best they can do given the situation. It's a choice between bystander deaths, dismembered children, bulldozed houses, international censure or total annhiliation at the hands of a group that is more ruthless and less intelligent.
Anybody that wants to sit around and distribute flowery words of peace and understanding and olive branches in the face of suicide bombers, I'd venture to say that you live in a world completely removed from the realities of an ideological war taking place no more than an howitzer shot from where you sleep, and more often than not, far closer.
Yes, I side with Israel. I always will. If it takes the destruction of the Arab world as we know if for them to survive, so be it.
