You are 9 years old. Your mother is reading bedtime stories to you and your younger brother, 6, when all of a sudden you hear gunshots and shouting voices. Your mother quickly grabs both you and your brother and brings you to the corner of the room and hunches over you, using her body as a shield to protect you.
Your eyes are closed and you've wet your pants, and the explosions and yelling seem to go on forever...even though the entire event lasted no more than a couple of minutes. When you open your eyes you realize that the wetness you have been wiping away from your face was not only your tears. An israeli grenade thrown close to your room blew the door apart in a hail of hand-sized splinters. You realize that many of them found your mother, and you look up in the horrific realization that the wetness in your eyes is her blood. Your brother took a smaller splinter to his eye and will always be blind in that eye for the rest of his life.
The Israeli government denies involvement in the attack in the News the next day and no one is ever held accountable for your mother's death.
You are a Palestinian.
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You are 9 years old, and walking down a busy street on a Monday morning in Jerusalem with your mother and your infant brother. You have just gone grocery shopping and are helping your mother by showing her how big you are because you can carry all the groceries for her so that she can carry your little brother, who is a new born. You are telling your mother what kinds of things you are going to do to be the best big brother ever, when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonates his bomb vest 25 feet away from you. You and your mother are thrown to the ground violently and you suffer second degree burns and a concussion. Your mother suffered the same, as well as a broken arm. Your baby brother was thrown from his mother's arms by the shock wave and fireball and died from the impact of his soft infant skull being slammed against the ground.
Later that day Hamas claims responsibility for the bombing over the news, and praises the bomber for his sacrifice in the fight against the evil Zionists.
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That suicide bomber was the boy from the first story, 10 years later.
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The point I am trying to make is that bloody, bloody warfare and terrorism have gone on for over the past 50 years in Israel. To get one side to lay down their hatred and to work towards peace is nearly impossible because everywhere you go, people have had death and injury to themselves and their family inflicted by the other side. Nearly everyone knows at least one person or family who have lost a family member to the fighting.
The palestinians have a fair gripe: their leadership has been corrupt and out to make concessions to the Israeli's, while Sharon was, prior to 2002, still sending in commandos to Palestinian neighborhoods to murder civilians. In the 1960's Sharon himself self led massacres where over 140 Palestinian civilians including women and children were slaughtered. The then Israel Prime Minister told him,
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Ariel, despite what anyone else may say outside of Israel, you did the right thing. The Arabs must know that the cost of killing Jews will come at a higher price than they are willing to pay. You did well.
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So how is comrpomise supposed to be worked out? I don't know. Hamas's first objective is to improve the Palestinian political landscape as well as their educational systems, and then to focus on the subject of Israel. Hamas is going to be so busy doing these things that the amount of attacks on Israeli's will probably slow down...until such a time that the Israeli government makes it necessary to retaliate for some strong-armed injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people, which their government, Hamas, must respond to the way they always have.
I am not offering a clear viewpoint on the whole thing, I'm just trying to show that the Israeli government has been just as bad as the Palestinians have. The only difference is one group is backed by the US, the other by the middle eastern Arab nations.