Before I begin I feel I have to say that I have many relatives in israel, and that my father fled the holocaust in Germany and was himself in a concentration camp after the pogroms of Kristallnacht.
I feel I have to say it because of the waves of people on his site who seem to have nothing better to do with their time than repeat Israeli government talking points.
Something snapped for me last night, watching the Israeli spokesman on the BBC. A smart good looking well-educated guy, Mark Regev he's called. Born in Australia, educated in the US.
Calmly repeating the same talking points that are being produced here in comments on diary after diary. Blaming the victims. Lying and spinning about the deaths of children in Gaza.
And I am furious and heartbroken.
You can hear him here on the BBC
He blames the victims. He shames his country, He shames himself.
He has nothing to do with the founders of Israel. My relatives went there with respect for the other peoples who shared the land. They wanted to build a new future together. Not to smirk about the killing of children.
Regev is like the worst apologists of the Bush regime. Smug self satisfied and justifying the unjustifiable. He is a one man anti tikkun olam. Not healing the world but destroying.
And he's come all the way to Israel from that dangerous place called Australia to do this.
For an alternative view I would heartily recommend this article by Avi Shlaim in The Guardian today, Shlaim is Professor of International relations at the University of Oxford. A former Israel Soldier who puts the situation in some kind of historical and econmonic perspective.
Please take the trouble to read it.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.
Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it
I expect the comments as always to fill up with more regev clones. But I would ask people to reflect about what their longterm solution is.
Becuase the only answer for Israel in the long term is to live in peace with its neighbours. And it's hard to get on with people who killed your children.