They're all victims.
The Gazans, the Palestinians, the Israelis...they're all victims.
They're victims of having inherited a millennia-long, futile struggle for dominance of a tiny part of the world with very limited resources.
A quick walk through the Old City in Jerusalem shows the strata of this historic tug-of-war.
Unfortunately, though perhaps understandably, the price has been radicalism on both sides. There are Israelis who provoke by planting settlements where they do not belong, and there Palestinian who provoke by lobbing rockets over the border. We can argue about who is worse, but the bottom line is that both knowingly provoke.
The great majority of Palestinians alive today were born after the modern-day state of Israel was born. They were weaned on the stories and/or realities of war and occupation in much the same way that Israelis were weaned on the horrors of the Holocaust. Encouraged by the larger Arab world, however, many bought into this notion that the clock could be turned back and the state of Israel destroyed. We could have had a two-state solution at the end of the Clinton Administration, but the Arab world left Yassir Arafat flapping in the breeze and he ultimately demurred. The Israelis were ready; the PLO/Fatah government was ready; but the Arab world was not yet ready.
Neither, apparently, is Hamas.
Yes, ultimately, it is up to the people of Gaza (the ones who voted for Hamas, anyway) to realize that the Hamas government has been, at best, counterproductive, and at worst, a disaster. However, we should give them some slack in the "thinking clearly" department.
The real tradegy -- over and above the obvious harm to lives and limbs -- is the fact that clashes like this harden opinions even more. That's why it's so important to support both sides in finding a way to a cease fire; they can't do it by themselves.
My personal wish is that Egypt conspires with other moderate voices in the Middle East to leash and muzzle Hamas. I believe they could do it if they really wanted to....
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