This story in Britain’s “The Independent” should be read by all who support what Israel is doing in Gaza. I’m printing a couple of clips here, but the whole story is worth reading.
Don’t get me wrong, I support Israel and its right to exist and I am absolutely against Hamas and its anti-Israel policies. But that is not an excuse for the Israelis to create their own Holocaust by killing innocent Palestinians.

   Gaza: The death and life of my father
    For Fares Akram, The Independent’s reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war

    The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on
    the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the
    gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and
    its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile
    agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange
    and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.

    My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in
    Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority.
    After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad’s father,
    Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon
    in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.

During the second intifada and until the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. In Gaza, the only escape is the beach or, if you are lucky enough, the farmland. My father hated what Hamas was doing to Gaza’s legal system, introducing Islamist justice, and he completely opposed violence. He would have worked hard for a just settlement with Israel and a better future for Palestinians. When the PA gained control over the West Bank, he moved to Ramallah to help establish the courts there.

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

When you have read all of the article, start thinking about what we, as Americans who support Israel should do if the Israelis don’t listen to the complaints of the civilized world. They have been very good at keeping reporters out of the fracas, and this story reveals that there is more going on than they allow us to hear or see.

It is a lot like us in Iraq.

Under The LobsterScope

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