That said, here is my presentation of the back story: Recently, the people of Gaza, the 'Palestinians' elected Hamas candidates to be their representatives in the assembly administering the phony authority granted the governors of that ghetto. Hamas is a creature of antizionism, and the only benefactor in the typical 'Palestinian' life. They were in effect saying, "Fuck it," after decades of subordination in a state they can't recognize.

I'm setting 'Palestinian' in quotes because it isn't a nationality, but I have to stop now. It's what was left after the previous residents and their families left if they could. It's probably a polyglot of ethinicities with two things in common: They aren't Jews and they are Muslim. Hamas is not the only political party representing them, but it's running the place. It has been running the place since Arafat's Fatah movement was defanged after one of the other intifadahs. The Palestinians are in the same boat as the European Jews were: unwanted.

Isreal is our colony, and couldn't exist without our largesse. We, the people of earth, demanded that Arafat's ruling coalition get things under control. Smack (attempted humiliating slap in the face)- get it together fool. Whap! (Can't import food or construction material) Get this place under control! Wham!(Blew up the police station) Get these punks off the street! 

Complicating the issue, we have a legitimate problem with Hamas. It crosses borders, it is floated with money from Iran and Syria and whatever other misanthropic source, and it is a double agent. The philanthropy and charity wing, call it the left wing, provides the only health care, the food choices, the fuel, the construction, the education for more Palestinians than Israel does, more than Fatah did. Arafat employed boss politics, doling out money to suicide bombers' families, but also shrewdly funding cooperative politicos while the Palestinian on the street was left to suffer under the occupation.

But however complicated that stuff may make it, it's pretty simple to see that there's an impasse stemming from the installation sixty years ago of a state where there was none, when the Western Bloc repatriated the unwanted European Jews to someone else's backyard. And who'da thunk it: The neighborhood around the lot where we put the Jews was pissed. Were they wronged? Yes. Did we do a good thing by the Jews? Yes. Was it in our interest to put a satellite in the middle of the middle east? Yes. Does everybody but us openly discuss the fact that it's a calculated risk to inconvenience lots of Arabs and Persians and miscellaneous Palestinian ethnic groups as a means to put a military base on the Mediterranean?

So the Palestinians affirmed their frustration, elected the "Fuck it!" party, and chose denial of Israel's right to exist over acceptance of their status as lesser. And now they've chosen not to renew the cease fire that didn't get them the concessions they expected, and they're firing rockets from their ghetto.

Forget proportionality. There is no such thing. There is diplomacy, and then there is war, in which there is a winner and a loser. Israel calls it a war, so forget methods for slowing the attack. But it's really ethnic cleansing. 1.5 million non-state residents of Gaza are walled into a ghetto. Sure, the bad guys are firing rockets from kindergartens. But those kindergartens can't generate anything but bad guys anyway- who could grow up in a ghetto as some other-status human and have anything but hostility for their betters?

Sure the rockets are coming from hospitals and shelters. It's a city. Find the bad guy in New York, and see if you can hit him clean from Philadelphia.

It is extreme and unconscionable if the Israeli Jews have no memory of the hostility and sadism of the Holocaust, and unforgivable that they have not made the difficult moves necessary to include the Palestinian people in their own fate.

It's also a sickness that the irony is lost on the Palestinians, that they have chosen to be represented by the political party denying the right of the neighbor to exist and threatening to march them en masse into the sea.

And here I am on the sideline, bankrolling the 'good guys' who must protect their citizens from random murder at the hands of Hamas, Iran, Syria, whoever. We just blew billions of dollars and decades of moral credit toppling Saddam Hussein to settle Boy George's family beef and enrich Cheney's oil field construction buddies. We did. That's our priority?

I demand a complete freeze on money, materiel, food, clothing, shelter, flights, bank accounts and anything else we can lay hands on until Israel goes to the table, finds an honest broker willing to accept their existence, and then turns it into a credible representative of the interest of the dwellers of that ghetto, and I want to back it up with a blockade of Gaza, UN intervention, and the next step if nothing happens in three months is revocation of Israel's charter and a fresh start. Because maybe they really are a bad neighbor.

Fuck it.