If there is a kernel of truth to be found that explains Israel continuation of its military occupation and colonization of Palestine, it is in this post.

Thanks for this summary of Israel's problems today and its apparent knack to sway America away from its core values of equality and civil/human rights. We are obviously paying for it around the world.

Demwords, please feel free to criticize the content of my diaries or even me, but please stop propagating lies about my views. Thank you.

I agree that shergald sounds the same note over and over, so I almost never read his diaries.  But where are the hate speech and "twisted hateful ideology" in this entry?

"understand why Israel feels threatened, because the arabs have often acted foolishly and in a self-defeating way, with their suicide bombings, rocket attacks, etc."

The arabs you refer to are the Palestinians. There is a racist tendency to group arabs together as if the entire Arab world were implicated in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when only Palestinian rights are in question.

As to the suicide bombings, most people don't really know what motivated them, and your remark about "an eye for an eye" is well voiced. But it was the Israelis that actually instigated them by killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians including children. See below.

The reality is sometimes quite different from propaganda intended to distort it.

Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= -5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Foc us

Like most Americans, Alison Weir, the editor of a small-town newspaper in California, knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, other than what she had gleaned from the evening news or newspaper headlines. As a journalist, her attention was on issues much closer to home. Neither a muslim nor a jew, she nevertheless became more curious about the topic of the Palestinian uprising. And as she researched it, she became increasingly suspicious that the American media were not telling us the whole story. Months later, she traveled to the occupied territories as an independent journalist to find out for herself what the U.S. media seemed to be omitting. Three months after returning from Palestine, Alison Weir quit her job and founded If Americans Knew, an organization dedicated to quantifying the ways in which the American media was misinforming the public about the conflict. Ms. Weir explains her group's methodology, analyzes the data, and reports on the key findings.

If Americans Knew can be linked to here:  http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/sid es.html

The first suicide bombing in the second intifadah was on Dec. 22 (no Israelis died in it). By that time, 86 Palestinian children had been killed by Israelis http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/rem ember2000.html

The first Israeli child was killed on Jan. 17, 2001. http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/rem ember2001.html

By that time, at least 90 Palestinian children had been killed by Israelis.

Alison Weir, in her documentary Off the Charts, noted the following:

Before a single suicide bomber had entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada, sometimes called, after Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the al Aqsa Intifada, during its first month, 27 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, and the majority due to gunshots to the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. Clearly the IDF were intentionally targeting these children, aiming at their heads with either rubber bullets or real bullets in the case of the child kills. We are talking here about a trained, mechanized army versus civilians, children participating in the intifada, the nonviolent resistance instituted by child and teenage Palestinian boys and girls. Oh, yes. Let's be fair. We did hear that an Israeli soldier lost his eye from a rock thrown by a Palestinian boy from a pretty IDF spokeswoman, but it was the only such incident reported in three years.

In addition to these children, many more innocent adult civilians were killed, in the month before suicide bombings commenced. If terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians, then clearly, Israel's armed forces were deep into terrorism, state sponsored terrorism, long before the Palestinians engaged in it to any degree. As a people fighting a military occupation, it would seem that the ultimate cause of all of these horrors on both sides rests with Israel and the purpose for which it continued its long occupation, the stealing of Palestinian lands.  

See Alison Weir's short documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America for the names, ages, places, and dates of these child killings.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= -5600677940569035557&q=Alternate+Foc us

To be accurate, there were sporadic bombing incidents engineered by Hamas extremists in Israel during the Oslo period. None at all occurred between 1998 and 2000. But the strong resumption of attacks after 2000, over fifty in the first year, was directly related to civilian and child killings by IDF, and it was not just Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations that were involved.

This Time.com article apprises of what motivated Palestinian suicide bombers at this particular moment:

Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl e/0,9171,1101020415-227546,00.html

"Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole--some might say brainwash--young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.

But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest intifadeh that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas--and they didn't require persuading. "We don't need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas' senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. "When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong," he explained."

From the mouth of Rantisi, but it also motivated Fatah supporters, to exact revenge for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Revenge is not a formal use of terrorism. See Alison Weir's film, Off The Charts, at Google Video.

This commentary is from an article by Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, which cynically denounced Olmert's statements professing concern for the well-being of Palestinian children:

(Ehud Olmert's Profound Ethics and Deep Lies.
http://www.ramikhouri.com/)

"For anyone interested in the facts about the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian children, a good place to start is the carefully checked data disseminated by the Palestinian Nongovernmental Organization Network (www.palestinemonitor.org). Their data is compiled and verified on the ground by the Ramallah-based Health Development Information and Policy Institute, which has been honored by the World Health Organization for its work in promoting Palestinian health needs. So these people know what they are talking about when it comes to health conditions on the ground in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Some of the facts they provide are as follows.

In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:

* 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.

* Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.

* 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.

* The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.

* During the first two months of the intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.

* An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.

* There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.

The Israeli army killing of Palestinian children continues apace. In its annual report May 16, the respected global human rights organization Amnesty International accused the Israeli army of killing 190 Palestinians, including 50 children, last year (2005)."

Here is some commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber:

"If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the "Man bites dog" news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly -- it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

Eye for an eye is a good way to characterize the Palestinian response to Israeli murders of children below any suicide bombing occurred. Rantisi's statements give credence to the idea that the suicide bombings were a response to Israeli killings of innocent Palestinians.

The notion that they were terrorist bombings is part of a propaganda effort by Israel to cash in on 9/11 and characterize Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim. The data do not support such a characterization. If killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, then Israel was certainly the first terrorist on the scene in this conflict (and that might go back to 1948).

Most right wing Zionist do not like the publication of these facts. During the second Intifada, five times as many innocent Palestinians died as innocent Israelis. Since 2004, the ratio has been 13 to 1.

When people attend funerals of children shot in the head by Israeli military forces, time and again, they become angry, or as Rantisi, the Hamas bomber recruiter, said, "emotional," meaning that an increased number of people were willing to take their own lives in retaliation. That even included a 16 year old female high school who managed to kill a 16 year old Israeli high school student, a story which made Time magazine at the time.

Nothing helped Sharon's effort to bury Oslo and continue the colonization of the West Bank than the revengeful suicide bombers of the second Intifada. Not that it made any difference because the IDF under Sharon urgings killed five times as many Palestinian civilians including children. I could post the data as I have done many times before, but this diary is near its end, so let's not waste space.

However, from the looks of it you support the IDF occupation forces against these nonviolent women, isn't that right? As far as I can tell, that is all you have been saying now for the past two weeks. Really feeling sorry for you.