So this blockade is counterproductive, stokes more anger and resentment from Palestinians, and fuels militancy and violence born of hopelessness and nothing to lose. What does Hamas and Gazaeans have to lose? What does Israel think will blossom and grow in a place where there are no jobs, scarcely any running water, sporadic electricity, limited cooking fuel, bombed out schools and hospitals, little or no medicines, limited and highly restricted movement and ruined, dilapidated shacks that people are forced to call home?
The end result will be resistance and unending violence. Israelis have every right to be patriotic and love their country. America has every right to support and befriend Israel. And Israel has every right and a moral obligation to defend itself and its citizens. These rights are not for the few and no country has the right to enslave, imprison and subjugate another people to a brutal and sustained occupation where life is not valued and where responses to the violence of resistance are met by the most vicious high-handed forms of punitive actions.
No, the United States cannot continue to support the most brutal actions by "my friend" by evoking the now idiotic and imbecilic phrase "Israel has a right to defend itself." This is not a schoolyard bully match. By towing this Israeli line America joins in devaluing the lives of other people while suggesting that Israeli life is sacred and superior. Israel is not being isolated, its current actions are being separated from the great nation that it is and the tremendous contributions that it has made to world development.
The world is not being hypocritical just because it condemns something that Israel did wrong. Just because Israel feels that it is above reproach and criticism does not make it so.
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