Word: israelism
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...After Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza in 2005, it retained full control of land and sea borders and of the air space. It periodically entered the territory with the goal of suppressing rocket fire aimed indiscriminately at southern Israeli towns. Over the four years before the December 2008 invasion, this rocket fire killed 13 Israeli civilians and made life miserable for tens of thousands of inhabitants of the towns targeted...
...After Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Israel and the U.S. set out to isolate Hamas by cutting off Gaza from the outside world. The justification was that Hamas was a terrorist organization “dedicated to the destruction of Israel.” Israel and its allies persisted in this strategy in spite of repeated indications, reported faithfully in the New York Times, that Hamas, like the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat before it, was looking for face-saving means to alter its position and accept a two-state solution...
...prison camp,” where the inmates were dependent on charity and Israeli government whim to keep them precariously one step away from “full fledged humanitarian crisis.” When this did not cause a revolt against Hamas in Gaza, Israel and the U.S., according to an article in Vanity Fair not yet refuted, organized a PLO coup, which failed, and led Hamas to expel the PLO from Gaza. There was eventually a truce between Israel and Hamas...
...Hamas claim, which seems basically sound to me, is that Israel was mainly responsible for its ending: Hamas suppressed almost, but not all rocket fire; Israel retaliated for the residuum by refusing to open the borders, so that Gazan misery continued unabated or worsened, and then carried out an armed incursion in November 2008. When Hamas refused to renew the truce and recommenced rocket fire, Israel invaded...
...Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable...