Man, it's too bad the Gaza strip is completely surrounded by Israel. If only it borded on another nation, so that other arabs could do something for their Palestinian brothers... [/sarcasm]

Seriously, when a popularly elected government launches missles over the border into a neighboring country, I'm not sure what right they have to demand a precisely nuanced response.

Here is Gideon Levy's take from Haaretz.

And Juan Cole's from Salon.

William Lind's take from Antiwar.com.

Amusingly (to me), the take from the Catholic New Times: "'It is never anti-Semitic to oppose injustice'"

Uri Avnery's take in Counterpunch.

Ramzy Baroud's take from Counterpunch. Interesting quote:

"In the matter of seven weeks, ending on June 21 with the killing of a pregnant woman, her unborn child and her brother and injuring 14 of the same family--Israel had killed 90 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were civilians. They included the killing of seven members of the same family while picnicking at a beach near the small Gaza town of Beit Lahia on June 9.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz justified the wanton killing of civilians, along with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as an unintended mistake, vowing to continue to fight 'terrorists' who fire homemade rockets against the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot. In the same period in which 90 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more maimed and wounded, Israeli army radio reported one injury resulting from rocket fire. No other source has confirmed the lone injury claim."

A quote from another Counterpunch article:

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the astounding statement, "I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of [Jewish] Sderot is even more important to me."

Hundreds of Israelis protested outside Olmert's home, denouncing the government as war criminals and demanding an end to the Gaza invasion. "We call for our government to stop targeting Palestinian civilians--the targeting of civilians is a war crime--and start negotiating with the elected Palestinian leaders, not to arrest them," said Yishai Menuhin, a spokesman for the peace group Yesh Gvul.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy also criticized the Israeli actions. He wrote, "A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization."

Israel's brutal retaliation against Palestinian civilians constitutes collective punishment. Attacks on a civilian population as a form of collective punishment violate article 50 of the Hague Regulations, which provides: "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible."

The Fourth Geneva Convention also prohibits collective punishment. Article 33 says: "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed." The Convention requires all states party to it to search for and ensure the prosecution of perpetrators of the war crime of "causing extensive destruction ... not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly." Amnesty International called the deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure war crimes.

Collective punishment is likewise forbidden by Article 75 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. As four US Supreme Court justices agreed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last week, Article 75 is "indisputably part of the customary international law."

Before Israel's invasion of Gaza last week, Hamas was beginning to retreat from its position that Israel has no right to exist. But Financial Times quoted Efraim Halevy, Israel's most widely respected security expert, as saying, "Why should Israel care whether Hamas grants it the right to exist. Israel exists and Hamas's recognition or non-recognition neither adds to nor detracts from that irrefutable fact."

The state of Israel is in no danger of perishing. Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world. Its "enemy" ­ the Palestinian people ­ have no tanks, no airplanes, no heavy artillery."

"Gaza in the Dark", by Robert Bryce, another Counterpunch article that details the plight resulting from the Israeli knock-out of the electrical system.

And this article, by Sandy Tolan and Tom Schwartz, from Antiwar.com, is particularly impressive, as Tolan is "the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006). He directs the Project on International Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, where he was an I.F. Stone Fellow. He has produced dozens of documentaries for National Public Radio, reported from the Middle East since 1994, and from more than two dozen countries over the last 25 years. He has also served as an oral history consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum."

Money quotes:

"Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.

"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"

...I've spent much of the last eight years trying to understand the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict from both sides for my book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. I've come to understand that the Nakba [The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians.] is as fundamental to the Palestinian narrative as the Holocaust is to the Israeli one. It is not possible to grasp the depths of the current tragedy, to say nothing of the fury and despair of the Arabs, without understanding the roots of the Palestinian catastrophe.

...Of all the stories of the Palestinian Nakba, none surpasses this march through the hills from al-Ramla and Lydda 58 years ago this month. "Nobody will ever know how many children died," Glubb would recall in his memoir, A Soldier With the Arabs. The Death March, as the Palestinians call it, along with the massacre at Deir Yassin, represent two of the central traumas that form the Palestinian catastrophe. Countless thousands fled from their villages, many because of "whispering campaigns" by Israeli military intelligence agents, which, following Deir Yassin, were designed to spark Arab fears of another massacre. Tens of thousands more were driven from their homes by force.

A Case of Never Again Gone Mad

The Nakba is so little known in the West, and its central narrative so contrary to the familiar "Uris history," that I went to extraordinary lengths in my book to document it. My source notes alone come to 30,000 words. My most compelling sources on the expulsions for Western readers will be the Israelis themselves. Rabin, in his memoir, described how in the critical days of mid-July 1948, he asked Ben-Gurion what to do with the civilian population of Ramla and Lydda, and that the prime minister had "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"

Yigal Allon, writing in the journal of the Palmach in July 1948, described the military advantages of the mass expulsions: Driving out the citizens of Ramla and Lydda would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population, while clogging the roads toward the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. Allon also described in detail the psychological operations whereby local kibbutz leaders would "whisper in the ears of some Arabs, that a great Jewish reinforcement has arrived," and that "they should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while there is still time. … The tactic reached its goal completely."

...The irony is that, contrary to helping build the safe harbor they have sought for so long, the Israeli government, just like the U.S. in Iraq, is only sowing the seeds of more hatred and rage."

Which is my point exactly - the Zionist dream is a fantasy that can only result in the destruction of Israel, the deaths of millions of Jews, and a second Jewish diaspora - and possibly the deaths by nuclear weapons of millions of Arabs as well.

Actually, according to an article I read, there has been ONE lone casualty of the Qassem rockets - and that one was is unconfirmed by anybody but the Israeli military.

However, THAT is Olmert's justification for massive military strikes on Gaza which resulted in at least thirty dead Palestinian civilians unconnected with the missiles and numerous others wounded.

Which is understood by everybody but Nazis and rightwingnuts.

"One missle launch, if not inadvertent, even without casualties, would be sufficient to constitute a cause of war. Missle launches are scarcely the only provokation in this instance, I think there was an invasion and kidnapping contributing as well."

I see - so if somebody throws a rock at a US citizen somewhere, we should nuke the country to glass, civilians and all.

Same logic.

While there was indeed the deaths of two Israeli SOLDIERS and the kidnapping of a third, that was prefaced by at least THIRTY DEAD CIVILIANS by the Israeli military in the month preceding - not to mention a 9,000 to 1 ratio of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israelis without charges and frequently tortured.

Which is why you rightwingnuts are basically Nazis.

Thank you for the historical notes.

I would suggest, however, that if the Arab media were repeating what the Israeli military were propagandizing, you can't really fault the Arab media for their influence on the flight, unless you can establish that the Arab media knew it wasn't true - which would seem unlikely (unless they had some other agenda.)