A Message to Israel.

And there was me thinking that it was only Jewish hardliners who supported the Gaza bombing. I just read with not a little degree of horror and astonishment that 87% of Israelis supported it.

Israel, you have to stop this. You were smelling bad even before the bombing started; the illegal occupations and decades of repression saw to that. Now the stench is becoming intolerable. What do you want the world to do? Stand by and gloat when your Arab neighbours band together to destroy your state? Most of us don’t want that. Most of us want the Jews to have their own homeland because we know you’ve had a rough deal down the centuries. Most of us are neither anti-Semitic nor Holocaust deniers. But you have to turn away from bloodshed and oppression if you’re to retain the support of the world community.

(You could, of course, tell me that 87% was inaccurate. You could tell me that it was, in fact, only 7%. Can you?)

I read recently that your government swore revenge for the death of an Israeli boy. The death of a child is a horrible, horrible thing, but you’ve already killed 459 Palestinian children. How much more revenge do you want?

I’m sorry if this post is uncharacteristically emotive. Visiting terror and death upon children makes me emotional.