It is good to see that Israel and Hamas have agreed to a truce, even if for 4 days only. I’m sure the Palestinians welcome it greatly with the hope that it will continue for many more days, weeks, and even months or years.

The responsibility for this war has been squarely placed upon Hamas who committed a horrendous and barbaric act in slaughtering Israelis men, women, and children, and raping women, and taking hostages. Israel has branded them as terrorists and animals and retaliated with heavy weapons, artillery and naval power, and bombing entire neighborhoods out of existence and killing over 14,000 people (men, women, children, and babies) and injuring many thousands more. They have not spared anything – private houses, schools, hospitals and mosques were all fair game.. They cut off food, heat, fuel, water, electricity, (the basic necessities of life) to an entire population. This is intentional and a war crime. In the past they got away with bombing civilians and other buildings by claiming collateral damage. But this cannot be collateral damage – it is intentional and a war crime. But Israel always gets away with war crimes because it disdains the United Nations, the same institution that helped to bring it into existence, and flouts other international laws. It is the “spoiled child” of the United States, and can do no wrong. Any U.S. president who goes against Israel will be committing political suicide. The strong Jewish lobbies and organizations together with the over 5 million Jews in the Unites States would ensure it. Moreover, the U.S. shares highly sensitive military and technological secrets with Israel, and thus can never walk away from that state. For all intentions and purposes, they are joined at the hips, and one cannot go against the other. The U.S. may try to temper Israeli action, but Israel can ignore what they say with impunity, and they often do.

But this current war is just one of several cycles between Israel and the Palestinians, and to really understand it, one has to go back a little into the history of the area. For one thing, the Jews were not in the land of Palestine for approximately 2,000 years. As one commentator stated, if someone can claim a land because they were there 2,000 years ago, then there would be a lot of shifting around of population in the world.

In the 19th century, the Jews were feeling the need for a home land because of persecution they were facing all over the world. After considering several options in different places, the Zionists led by Theodore Hertzl agreed that a suitable place would be Palestine, which was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

Thereafter, Jews started to emigrate to the area, and as their numbers grew, they came into conflict with the local population – the Palestinians, who were there from time immemorial. From 1914 to 1922, the Jews were barely 10% of the population of Palestine. Some of the time they were barely 2 or 3 per cent. Their numbers started to increase in the 1930’s to around 25%. During all this time, they were encroaching on land owned by Palestinians, just as the settlers are doing today in the West Bank.

In the 1930s and 1940s, several Jewish terrorist organizations were formed, and they terrorized the Palestinians and later, the British, who had a mandate to partition the land. The British eventually fled in 1947 without completing their mandate, and the Jews declared the state of Israel in 1948. Many Palestinians fled when that happened, fearing for their lives. The Jews terrorized them further, destroyed their homes, mosques, and other institutions, and expelled around 700,000 from the land, and this is some of the land that the Palestinian people are trying to recover.