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Radar, what is the proper response to those who raze your home to the ground? What is the proper response to those who shoot your children (some of them babies)? What is the proper response to those who treat you as prisoners, even though you have committed no crime?
There's a young man, a Palestinian, whose middle class parents (yes there are a few of them left) sent him to be educated at Bradford university, in the UK. He returned home to visit his family during the Summer recess and the Israeli government have refused to allow him to leave Palestine and return to the UK for the third year of his degree. We're approaching the last 3 weeks of the first semester and he is still trapped behind the Wall. He is not a terrorist. He has committed no crime. He is just a young man trying to educate himself
The people living in the occupied territories are mainly crammed into one of the most densely populated areas of the planet, with very few amenities, intermittent (in some cases no) electricity supplies, tragically high unemployment rates, little access to medical care without running the gauntlet of checkpoints and occassionally opened gateways where they are routinely refused (this holds true for pregnant women trying to get to the hospitals). They are imprisoned. There is nowhere from them to go and even if there was, access to routes out are all but vanished.
These people have been imprisoned. The Gaza strip is the world's biggest prison camp in all but name.
The fact that Arab leaders and academics make hideous and unconscionable statements about the Holocaust, and about wiping Israel off the map is irrelevant to Israel's treatment of these people. The relatively small number of people who are involved in rebellion, do not justify Israel dehumanising and brutalising innocent civilians. To suggest it is wickedness incarnate for Hamas to send suicide bombers to kill Israeli babies and yet mere defence when Israel sends its soldiers or its bombs to kill Palestinian babies is intellectually bankrupt.
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