OK there are a lot of nasty regimes out there, and we should try to keep politics and football apart, but Israel like to think of themselves a civilised Western society. They spin their atrocities by keeping western journalists out of war zones so "rockets fired from school/hospital" statements cannot be challenged. Their policy of " a hundred eyes for one of ours" has been ingrained for years over many campaigns and they are still in breach of UN sanction to remove West Bank settlements. Yet the US led Bush/Blair "roadmap to peace" was never more than spin and the US pumps billion in millitary aid every year.
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You really should have stopped typing there.
Now that WOULD be a spicy local derby with a bit of feeling in it!!!
I have heard that the Palestinian football team are not up to much, they just keep firing long-range rockets to no great effect....
I'll get me coat.
I really applaud you for bringing this up but 'General Charlton' is not the right category and I'll say that before someone else does.
I think that would be an admirable decision. Something major really needs to be done as the situation in Gaza, as it was in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, is gratuitous and unjustified.
Hamas is actually the elected leadership of Gaza in an election deemed acceptable to international observers (unlike the US friendly regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia for example) and considering the continual land encroachments by Israel in the past 60 years across Palestine and the way that vital humanitarian aid is regularly prevented from getting into the Gaza Strip, not just during this conflict, it is hardly surprising that home-made rockets are fired haphazardly from time to time.
Prior to this attack, there was a six month truce between Hamas and Israel which was originally broken by the Israelis back in November when they killed four members of Hamas.
Unfortunately, not many people in the West know the full history of the formation of Israel since 1948 and its impact on the indigenous Arab people but it has meant displacement, no right of return to their home villages (which are now behind Israeli borders) for more than one million Palestinians, and continued poverty and disenfranchisement.
The US, and the UK I'm afraid to say, have blocked scores and scores of UN Resolutions over the years in order to legitimise Israeli acts like incursions and land grabs. Even now, as the bombing continues in Gaza, Israel continues to build settlements on the West Bank (the other Palestinian territory) which the international community has deemed as illegal.
You will hear the likes of Livni and Olmert in Israel, or Bush in the US, saying that Hamas 'won't recognise' an Israeli state. Well that is untrue. They are prepared to acknowledge Israel as an independent state as long as the borders being utilised in 1967, prior to the six day war in which Israel seized swathes of new territory, can be brought back.
This would give the Palestinians much less land than suggested in the late 1940s when Israel was a totally new nation, just in its infancy, and recently placed on the map of the Levant.
I believe the only way to make Israel make serious attempts to calm the situation down in Palestine, assuming the US won't ever take an impartial view of what has gone on, is to consider economic boycotts of Israeli products. It worked with South Africa and it 'might' work again. A ban on its sporting teams would also pinch them greatly and stain their squeaky clean image.
I have spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I genuinely know how Arabs feel about Israel and how they see the way forward but, as things stand I, for one, cannot really blame them for fighting to the very last. The number living below the poverty line in Gaza is close to 70%. This equates to parts of Africa affected by war and famine.
I don't want to get into a political tit for tat as I have had those before on Net Addicks but the points I have made are as accurate as I can relay them.
Israel is a totally unique concept in the world and it is undeniably here to stay but the only way to peace in the Middle East is for the Palestinians, who have lived there for hundreds and hundreds of years, to be given justice and a legitimate and honestly brokered homeland. We are a long, long way from that, hence the hatred and the violence.