Yee-had!

Boy! Them Israelis know how to ring out the old with a bang. Talk about taking an elephant gun to rouse up some grouse. If I may paraphrase, it’s sort of like when you are sitting there reading of a summer’s day and a fly keeps buzzing around you but you just shrug it off because flies don’t bite. Then it gets your goat and you put down your book only to lose your page and now you are mightily cheesed off. The fly must die, you cry. Find the freakin’ swatter and come back to the hunt. No fly. You wait. You hear it. Poised, you stand upon the shaky ottoman and survey your empire. There on the ceiling. SPLAT! It was a largish fly and now its mass is spread, red and black, all over your recently painted ceiling. You know there will be a hew and a cry if you leave the drying carnage and you know that any argument defending your actions will not be appreciated.

So, instead of going back to your book you get a paper towel and some 409 and soon enough you are going back to what you were so innocently doing twenty minutes before, reading. Then you hear the fly’s brother coming for revenge and you contemplate an early cocktail. But instead you move to where there are no flies and grumble a little that a fly got you so worked up. You know there are flies and you think maybe you should have just held the swatter and idly wave it in case he comes around again. But you didn’t. You took decisive action believing, almost, that the other flies would know not to mess with you. That they would meet the same fate if they dared. But the new fly is filled with hatred over his lost brother and doesn’t care if he meets the same fate if he can just get some revenge. And he goes in search of you hoping to find you in the brief time on earth allowed flies. He also knows there will be other flies to come after him and that you have what they want.

In Gaza, where the Palestinians are crammed in like flies at a dumpster (it has the same land mass as two Washington DCs for 1.4 million inhabitants), the people have been fighting since they began to walk erect and could use their opposable thumb to swing a club. Palestinian Arabs claim Gaza as their homeland and while they have been there a long time, with mixed results, no one else quite sees it that way. They have been run over and run by the Egyptians, the British and Israelis and that’s just the last century. They never really had it all together but most certainly not in living memory.

Remember Ringo’s separated-at-birth-brother Yasser Arafat? The guy was all that for a while but soon realized that the cause would never be won and so cashed in depriving “his people” of the basic necessities while he banked billions. He turned down an Israeli deal that promised more self-rule and a real chance to have their own state and there has been little peace since. Good call.

But the new guys suck, too. The Hamas charter states: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” While Jihad means “struggle” in the Q’uran, mostly it has come to mean “wipe the sons a bitches off the face of the earth.” Hamas seems keen to do this where Israel is concerned even as other Muslim groups would like to see all of us Crusaders take a hike. In the most recent elections in Gaza, Hamas won big time taking 76 of the 132 seats to defeat the more moderate Fatah party. Now all of Gaza suffers the horrendous response to Hamas’ harassment of the all powerful Israel.

My man Zbigniew Brzezinski said this morning that the killing of (he said 400) Palestinians and wounding 1,400 more was too harsh. After all, with all of the homemade rocket attacks on Israel, not one person was killed. Morning Joe got indignant, as he is wont to do, and fired back with his typical bellicose bravado that a strong response is all these people understand. Joe’s a pretty macho guy. He’s a real toughy. Zbiggy came back with, “You have a stunningly superficial understanding of foreign policy in the Middle East.” I gave him a standing O, and Joe went ballistic.

There are always two sides to a story and this one has even more. Who knows what will happen, but I doubt I will live long enough to see the kind of peace in the Valley that most of us hope for in that land of endless jihad. It was interesting when I was bouncing around in Wiki-land that some wit had hacked in and when I clicked on the link for “Hamas” I came to this page. I reprint it in its entirety:

Fuck Hamas