For fun, I'll juxtapose that photo with one of Tel Aviv, Israel:
The two places look similar, no?
Anyway, the airstrikes have killed around 300 Palestinians (so far), and at last word the attacks are continuing.
For those of you who don't know much about the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I'll give a brief, probably biased, version of events:
Around 60 years ago, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the United Nations decided that Jews should have their own homeland. Rather than giving up any of their own land in Europe or Eastern Europe, the UN made the wonderful decision to settle the Jews in what the Torah claims is the Jews' homeland: the area in and around Jerusalem.
The problem was that there were already people living on that land: the Palestianians. And there were, literally, millions of them. That problem was solved by simply forcing the Palestinians to move, allowing the Jews to move in and create the quasi-democratic state of Israel. I say quasi because, although the Palestinians are governed by Israel and there are many more of them than there are Israelis, the Palestinians don't vote in Israeli elections and have no official voice in the main Israeli government. They have their own pseudo-government, run by the political party Hamas, which the Israeli government has conveniently labeled "terrorist" and which was the target of the weekend's airstrikes.
But anyway. The vast majority of Palestinians now live in either the West Bank or the tiny Gaza Strip. To add to that, Jewish Zionist settlers are continually building settlements that encroach on the small amounts of land the Palestinians still control. The Palestinians are literally fenced in, not allowed to travel freely, and are denied basic necessities including food, medicine, and education. Every once in a while, Israeli bulldozers will raze a few houses in response to a salvo of rockets aimed at Israeli towns.
An Israeli might tell you something like "Well have you ever been suicide bombed? Have you ever been attacked with rockets? These Palestinians are dangerous!" But that is ignoring the fact that the Palestinians view the Israeli state as having stolen the Palestinians' homeland. 60 years ago. The struggle against Israel is not, for many Palestinians, a struggle against Judaism or the West: it's a struggle for political freedom and sovereignty. They resent the West only because it is complicit in Israel's aggression.
Yes, the Palestinians do sometimes resort to terrorism to further their political goals. But, looking at the situation from their perspective, what other options do they have? They have no leverage politically or militarily. They are second class citizens being governed against their will by a much smaller minority.
Israel claims that its Palestinian foe is an existential threat and must be dealt with harshly by, amongst other tactics, bombing its governing party's headquarters with warplanes. But really, how dangerous can a people be when all that they can do to resist Israeli aggression is to throw stones at tanks:
Israel claims that its struggle against the Palestinians is a life or death conflict. But surely there must be a better solution than to allow an entire generation of young people to grow up in what amounts to a lawless refugee camp. What better terrorist recruiting environment could there be?
Stop with the warplanes and start allowing the Palestinians to assert their humanity. Give them food; give them medicine; give them education; give them democracy.
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