Don’t Be Deceived By Hamas

There are two sides to the current Israel/Hamas conflict: Those who believe violence is justified to achieve an end and those who don’t.

“I won’t have this namby-pamby, wishy-washy nonsense about not hitting people who deserve it. A good trashing is what’s needed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.” — Aunt Marge Dursley

There are two sides to the current flare up in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and they aren’t Israel, and its supporters, versus Palestine.

On one side of this conflict, are those who think violence against innocent people is acceptable, if the cause is just enough. On the other side, are those who don’t.

Either you agree with Ms. Dursley, fictional as she is; or you don’t.

Whether or not it is morally acceptable or even justifiable to evict a family from its home- which is what Hamas claims to be the reason for their latest attack on Israel- is a complicated question for the ages, subjective.

What if the property is owned by someone else and the eight Palestinian families in question have been legally evicted in a process which took Israeli courts decades to resolve?

Does anyone really have a right to “own” property, like land, anyway? And, if so, who- the person who lives there or the person who pays the government for it? Someone else?

The Muslim Caliphates who conquered the geographic area on which modern-day Israel now stands claimed that land in perpetuity many, many centuries ago. Whether or not you recognize that claim as sacrosanct depends, again, very much on perspective.

All deeply esoteric questions.

Your answer depends on your personal viewpoint, which is based on a complex brew of your life experience, genetics, culture, brain chemistry and a million other equally broad qualities, each complete with their own subcategories, and still smaller divisions within those, infinitum.

“I contain multitudes,” is how American poet Walt Whitman described the human condition. The fact that we tend to disagree about things isn’t surprising; it’s amazing any of us ever manage to…