CANTOR/HOYER: A defensive war

I guess 60+ years of coddeling the jews isn't enough. Giving Israel to the jews is one of the biggest mistakes the West has ever made. 60 f-ing plus years later we're still paying the price. Abolish all financial aid to Israel now. Then the jews will either make peace, or die. Either way the US shouldn't be involved.

This article is so not helpful. Hoyer and Cantor say that there are only good guys because they have been to the sleepy little town and have seen it with their eyes. Let them go to Gaza right now and talk with the parents & children and then tell us their story. The public should get more balance and helpful insight from their elected officials.

Israel needs some B-52s so they can do some real bombing runs on these scum. Going out of their way to avoid civilian casualties doesn't work. Carpet bomb them into oblivion. After 20-30 thousand are dead, the rockets will stop.

"Either way the US shouldn't be involved." That was the same sentiment that was prevalent during the mid-30's and early 40's, and look what happened. War ensued and tens of millions of people died worldwide. Over 3 MILLION Jews were slaughtered in Europe alone. Do you REALLY want millions of Jews to be slaughtered today? That will be the outcome if the US, and the rest of the world, doesn't support Israel in the protection of their ancestral homeland against the genocidal planes of Hamas and their supporters. "Let them go to Gaza right now and talk with the parents & children and then tell us their story." It's rather ironic that Gaza and the West Back, both of which had tens of thousands of Arab residences through the entire Israeli "occupation," didn't have very many problems when the Israelis were in control. It's only since Hamas has gain control of the area, control that was given to them in an attempt to STOP the conflicts, that the conflicts has not only continued, they have accelerated. The Arabs want peace? Then get them to STOP attacking a legitimate country, get the to STOP attacking Israel. Israel exists,and they have a right to protect themselves and their country from attack, so you and the rest of the world better get use to it.

They went to Southern Israel. Did they go to Gaza? Foes are "implacable" right up until you notice how poor, sick, hungry, desperate they are... That's when you notice that they are actually human beings, and that's when you can write an article about how necessary a war is.

Let the Arabs cease their acts of war and there will be peace. But they won't, they are cowardly thugs, the 'leadership' of Gaza and WB for that matter. Cowards

Hopefully men and women of good will and wisdom on both sides will see the folly of killing and bloodshed, and then the peoples of the area will know peace and have the chance to live out their lives in relative tranquillity.

To the Jew haters, nothing will ever justify any Israeli military action. Making the logical points - that Hamas targets Israeli civilians, and uses schools and hospitals to launch attacks, that Israel drops leaflets to warn Palestinian civilians of imminent attacks - does nothing to sway the Jew haters. The conclusion of the antisemites is emotional, not reasoned, and so they cannot be convinced that Israel is ever justified in defending its citizens. As has been said in the NY Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, this war so morally clear-cut that it can be used as a moral barometer to identify who are the hardcore antisemites. See below.

What a wonderful commonsense article, one that stands in stark contrast to the foolishness and Hamas apologetics penned by President Carter yesterday. The comments on this page shock me with their blindness to the cause and effect in the Gaza conflict. Israel indeed wanted peace with and a homeland for the Palestinians, but they have received continued hatred for their trouble. If Hamas would simply allow Israel to exist in peace, all the trouble would end, and everyone knows it. The problem is that huge numbers of Palestinians don’t want to live and let live with Israel. They want the Israelis driven out, and no other result will suffice. Doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself against attack? And please, linda.heaney, on what planet have you been living? The only news we hear about in terms of this conflict is the humanitarian and collateral damage issues in Gaza. It’s like seeing a murder case tried and hearing only about the poor, disadvantaged upbringing of the assailant and excluding the way he gunned his victims down in cold blood as “too prejudicial.” Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Don’t you know that? What would you want to do to an organization that runs what amounts to a neighboring country’s government dedicated to the ideal of destroying your nation and acting on that tenet by firing bombs into your territory? How would America be expected to act if the Canadian Conservative party had openly sought the destruction of America as part of its platform for decades and then decided to start firing missiles that Canada got from China at Buffalo and Detroit? Yes, the suffering in Gaza is terrible, but it is the direct product of the Hamas aggression, not the understandable Israeli response. It’s hard to take these humanitarian cries seriously unless they are accompanied by a condemnation of the Hamas aggression. All Hamas need do is stop the violence permanently, and the food shortages and collateral damage will end. What’s so hard to understand about that?

The article is crazy. Isreal is doomed if it fails to understand why they are hated. When you steal, land, water and freedom you pay the price. Let democracy take hold in Isreal and the Jews will slowly become the minority and problem solved. Racists because unless you are a Jew you have no rights. We did not put up with South Africa acting like this. Americans are being scammed for millions and make the problem worse. Enjoy the un-employment q's USA. Glad I live in Australia

WayneAussie: Non-Jews can (and do) vote in Israel. What specific rights are non-Jews denied? The Jewish state was carved out of the British Mandate following WWII. This was countenanced by the United Nations. How did they "steal" land? The Israelis were guaranteeing the Gazans access to water, until the Gazans' terrorist activites made humanitarian aid impossible. Should the Israelis be held responsible for the fact that Palestinian culture encourages heinous acts of violence targeted at aid workers and other innocent civilians?

Israel has every advantage now. Blind support of lone superpower. Puppet regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq--the key regional Arab powers and recent demographic dividend from Russian Jews and still it can't find peace. In 20 yrs, China will be able to check US power, Egypt/Saudi Arabia and Iran will be nuclear powers and their populations will soar in the case of Egypt and Iran to well over 100 million. Then what. It will beg for the 1967 borders. You can't get away with an injustice indefinitely even if things seem rosy now. Palestinians need only wait one more generation.

Israel is neither stategicall nor morally important to the united states. they lost their moral high ground when they ethnically cleansed 700,000 innocent palestinians fromt their own homes so that they could reach the majority quota required to have a "jewish state". also the state of racism in Israel is also horendous. those people dont even see arabs as human beings, as is obvious from reading some of the comments on this article.

Israel controls Gaza's borders and has starved and tortured the place continuously since giving up on trying to own a third of it. The claims that Hamas and other terrorists are responsible for Israel's killing hundreds of civilians are not going to be swallowed by the world at large, and no amount of advertising in the form of op-eds such as this will achieve it.