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There you have it: the unanimous consensus of the United States of America.
During the entire time this resolution was pending, Israel was bombing Gaza with little military impact, and the cost of hundreds of civilian dead. Gaza is small, 139 square miles (the size of Detroit), with the same population density as Boston. With no authority other than force, Israel has issued warnings or orders to Palestinians to leave almost half of Gaza, with a predictable dislocation of thousands of people.
Gaza, with a population of about 1.8 million, is, for all intents and purposes, just a large concentration camp. Gaza's borders are closed and Gaza has been under siege by Israel for years (also a human rights violation). Gaza is about ten times the size of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943), where more than 400,000 Jews suffered under the Nazis, at first cooperatively. When the Jews had had enough and the uprising began in 1943, the Germans responded with overwhelming force, going block-by-block blowing up houses and wiping out virtually all the residents.
Just a few hours after the United State Senate unanimously passed its resolution giving Israel the green light to do whatever it wanted to anyone it fingered as a bother, Israel's invasion of Gaza began.
There is blood on every United States senator's hands
By passing resolution 498 unanimously, the U.S. Senate signaled unambiguously that it had not only lost its mind, it had gone out of its way to abandon any mindful approach to endless war in the Holy Land.
By framing an intractable, multi-faceted struggle for human rights as having only one dimension -- Israeli self-defense -- the world's greatest deliberative body has deliberately declared itself brain dead. No one seriously questions Israel's rights, but not one of these self-important senators was willing to acknowledge that the right to self-defense is not Israel's alone.
By citing "unprovoked rocket fire," and nothing else, 100 senators have demonstrated their unwillingness to exercise complex, reality-based thinking. Certainly, as the UN Human Rights Council acknowledges again and again, Hamas rockets represent another war crime -- but that doesn't cancel decades of Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
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