Palestinians have embraced death because it has more to offer than the life under Israeli imprisonment.

Its called losing all hope and is exactly the problem with the majority of the Middle East right now. This is the reason we have so many extremist ideologies from that region, this is the reason we have suicide bombers.

This invasion and bombing isn't the real problem, the real problem is the occupation, imprisonment, starvation, no electricity, no jobs, no connection with the outside world, constant harassment from IDF and settlers, no freedom of mobility, no future life of any king being presented to the average Palestinian.

Israel is causing its own terrorism. Israel can fix this by simply discontinuing its illegal acquisition and occupation of Arab lands. This isn't the 1960's and 70's. Arabs by large have given up their fruitless claims to Israel Proper, as evidenced in 2001 or 2000 when they all presented Israel with a full peace plan for the entire region where all Israel had to do was return to their own country to have full peace and normal relations with everyone.

However, Israel didn't even discuss it and instead to continue the bloodshed of its own people.

What kind of people are the Israelis who vote for these leaders who would rather see their people have to hide from missiles and their sons and daughters in IDF facing a constant enemy whose only desire is death?

@ mrstickball

Yeah, I've seen that before... that's one of the many reasons why the UN is a joke.

The sad thing is, when a legit ambulance carrying actual hurt people needs to get to a hospital, the Israelis have to stop them at check points and search them because of the terrorists using this ploy as often as they do.

Don't even make me break out the speeches of Hamas saying that they will accept nothing but the dstruction of the state of Israel.  There is no peace, because the Palestinian leadership admits that they don't want it... they want to "drive the Jews into the sea".  That is their admitted goal, which cannot be denied, because they admit it on TV.  So it's not a matter of my opinion, it's a matter of Hamas admits that this is the only outcome they will accept... "Palestine, from the River to the Sea"

why is it you always resort back to the one group that will never change. I was talking about the entire Arab league, i.e. the leaders of the Arab world that actually matter and as a group could force Hamas to sit down and shut up.

So that's not a matter of my opinion, its a matter of the entire Arab League giving Israel a perfect oppurtunity to grasp peace for its people, but apparently they only outcome they will accept...

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." -- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
-- Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

yeah, only the Arabs talk about killing off the other... I could go on, but it is pointless past rhetoric spoken by racists bigots. The future is in the now and Arabs have tried at least once for real peace, as I noted earlier.

As for your question as to why I continue to resort back to Hamas... is it not obvious??  You yourself stated that Hamas was demoractically elected to lead the Palestinian people.  So how is the group, whom the Palestinians chose to lead them, not relavent to the conversation?

One of Hamas' many election promises to the voters was to "defeat the Zionist enemy" and "drive them into the sea".

That was their political platform, and the Palestinian people voted for them because of their promises.

Let's just play a pretend scenario here.  Let's just say a guy came around in America saying that he wanted to enslave African-Americans again, and he wanted Americans elect him to the office of the Presidency.  And for arguements sake, let's just say that a majority of voters voted him into power.

Would it be safe to assume, in such a scenario, that the average American is a racist bigot?  Uh.. yes.  Why?  Because if they believed in equal rights for all, the majority wouldn't have voted for such a disgusting bigot to begin with.

Therefore, in this real world scenario of Hamas....

They ran a platform of killing the Jews, and the Palestinians overwhelmingly voted them into power based on this platform.  Hence, it is safe to assume that the average Palestinian wants to drive the Jews into the sea, and take all of Israel, and make it Palestine.

So, yes, Hamas as the leader bears the brunt of the responsibility.  But the people who voted for such a murderous platform cannot escape responsibility of this either, because they are the one's who placed Hamas in the position of power to begin with.

And if it is true, as you stated, that the Arab world could force these measures on Hamas, where are they?  They took power nearly 3 years ago, and the Arab world is silent.  Do I think that the Arab leaders despise Hamas?  Yes, without a doubt.  They know that a fundementalist group seizing power in their nation is a surreal possiblity.  But, they cannot openly support Israel's war against Hamas, or will bear the brunt of riots from their own people for doing so.

Therefore, since the Arab nation are forced into silence to avoid internal mutiny, how exactly do expect your plan to work?

And what caused this 'occupation, imprisonment, starvation' and so on? It's not like these problems suddenly cropped up when Israel took the Gaza Strip and West Bank in the late 60's.

The Palestineans & Arabs rejected the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 and began a civil war with the Jews.

In 1964 the Palestinean Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. This was before Israel took any more land outside of the UN mandate to create the state of Israel. So it's not like the PLO was reactionary to further Jewish aggression. It's charter was created to state 'The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood... [T]he Jews are not one people with an independent personality because they are citizens to their states.' - Documenting the fact they were, and are, against the creation of a Jewish state. Through history, we've seen that their nature is to violently combat the Jewish state.

Why, when Black September occured, did Palestineans not fight the Jordanians back, at-length, to re-claim parts of Jordanian territory that were (historically) Palestinean? Why didn't Jordan recognize the rights of the Palestineans, and grant them land in their own country like Israel had been forced to? What about Lebanon, as they have former Palestinean land, and have not given up any of theirs for peace?

Also, the Arabs have claimed argued for Israel to give back the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as pretexts for war.

For the economic issues - Don't you realize that they've been caused thanks to suicide bombers from the Gaza Strip? Their economy is in shambles because of the Second Intifada, and well as severe corruption of Palestiean authorities. If your lobbing suicide bombers, at a country...What the heck do you expect Israel to do to Palestinean workers? Israel castrated their economy (which was totally reliant on Palestineans working in Israeli businesses) due to Palestinean violence, and nothing else.

Great quote from said interview about corruption of the Palestineans:

If you live in a backwards country, full of ignorant, corrupt people, how do you expect an economy to survive? Just because Israel's border with the Palestineans is closed down, does not mean that they couldn't get work in Egypt. Oh wait, the Palestians are killing Egyptians too, which is further complicating things.

Palestine could be free. They could have economic prosperity (as they did before they started bombing Israeli's). They could choose not to live in a jail. But for one reason or another (corruption, desire for self-rule over prosperity), they aren't.

superchunk - Why do Israeli's vote in leaders that make choices that continue Palestinean violence? Because they still want to live in Israel, governed by Israelis. I hate to say it, but unless the state of Israel ceases to exist, then there will always be violence there. The chief goal of the Palestineans (especially Hamas) isn't independance. It's independance from Jews living in the Middle East, and the establishment of a pan-Arab nation free from infidels like the Jews.

@Comrade and Mrstickball,

I gave you only a handful of quotes from Israeli leaders that all demonstrate that just as the Palestinians groups have held onto the idea of removing Israel, so has Israel demonstrated removing the Palestinians.

The difference is Israel has actually had the tools and support to do so.

We can go all day with nitpicking these past bigotry and genocidal comments from all sides, but that is all besides the point.

At no time since 1967 has Palestinians lived freely or anything even close to resembling 'economic prosperity'. To believe this is just ignorant. If it were not for US policy of squashing every UN measure against Israel I would have tons of UN measures demonstrating this, however, that is not the case and I don't feel like spending the time to properly research all the video/written examples of blatant racism, attacks, murder, destruction, etc of Palestinians people, livestock, farms, etc. that has occurred over the last 30 years. But, I think the quotes above demonstrate this, especially the one that flat out described it by Rabin. That has been Israeli policy for a long time now, to make Palestinian life so horrible they will just leave without a genocide. The problem is the Palestinians desperately want their homes equally as much as Israel wants to take it from them. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that when you take away everything a man has to live for he will attack you to the death.

That is exactly what is happening here. Palestinians feel they have no other recourse but violence as that seems to be the only thing Israel and the world at large notice.

Before the first uprising they had nothing and were pretty much ignored by the world. Then they revolted against their prison keeper and what happened? The world recognized the brutality that is Israel. They saw rock throwers being shot in the heads, arms and other body parts broken by IDF, and other actions that made the world force Israel to the table. Then they got Oslo and the illusion of self governance.

However, the treatment and brutality continued. The expansion of illegal settlements continued.

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

The constant attacks by settlers increased. Farms destroyed. Houses razed. Forced expulsions from homes in Jerusalem when the Arab had papers proving family ownership for hundreds of years. All of this while there was NO rockets or bombers.

I have seen video of a quiet calm protest by an Jewish Israeli group that also had many Palestinians. On Palestinian man pulled out a Palestinian flag. No weapons at all, no rocks, just words, signs and a flag. The IDF immediately grabbed the man kicking and beating him right in front of everyone including his genitals many times. Then they dragged him to a parked police car and once inside two soldiers continued his beating. Why? Because that is what happens in Israel. IDF and settlers are just as bad as Hamas much of the time.

These actions don't make it on our prime time news. US suppresses that information just like the Israeli justice system very rarely addresses these reports as well.

I don't care what you say about the actions of Hamas' military wing, I have already commented on how these things are wrong many times. The horse has been dead for a long time. The fact remains the root cause is the daily brutality that every Palestinian witnesses. The reason I had to listen to an 8 year old American born boy who after less than a month living there was crying on the phone because of fear. Fear from soldiers, who should be stopping violence from everyone, and terrorist (settlers) with guns.

This boy grew up in America with American schools for 3 years. He was never taught to hate Jews or Israel. Yet within a year of living their he and his 3 brothers had that hate. They've told me stories that I couldn't even begin to consider letting my child live through. Yet his parents moved there just before the last uprising and since their small village was a pretty far away from a settlement and no-one was aligned with any military group, it was considered ok so that they could spend at least 5 years to learn Arabic language and customs. They did learn the language.

But, now they also have a very strong animosity towards Jews that I constantly have to redirect. I have to make them realize that its not all Jews or all Israelis for that matter. To that they do agree because they did have the rare occasion to see a nice soldier and of course Jews here are no where near the same attitude and composer as the settlers there.

So, keep echoing Hamas. Ignore the facts on the ground and actions taken by Israel. Ignore the stance the Arab leaders by large actually discussed and presented Israel not all that long ago. All the while another million Palestinians are abused this month and a few hundred youths give up and decide their life is better suited to die for their cause. BOOM.

^^^ You keep dodging what we are asking. You asked me a question, I responded, and now you are ignoring my question to you. Please answer my question, and then we'll move on to another one from you.

I have answered the question many times. You just choose to ignore.

Hamas is irrelevant. They are byproduct of Israeli brutality. If you make the people have hope and prosperity they will not support violent means. It is a simple fact that seems to be too complex for you to understand.

Actually read my post above and let it sink in before you answer.