The following article is worth highlighting because of the extent of its content with reasonable view. This sort of critique is rare to find in today’s extreme media. The article is written by Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist and published in The Canberra Times of Australia in 2nd January 2009.Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, was distraught at the funeral of Irit Shetreet, one of four Israelis to be killed by Palestinian rockets since Israel launched its bombing campaign against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Sunday.
However, he was wrong to say that her death was ''the latest manifestation of 3000 years of anti-Jewish hatred''. The hatred is real, but its sources are a good deal closer both in time and in space.
Western media coverage rarely goes into the origins: even what happened last year or 10 years ago is treated as ancient history. So the fury and despair of 1.5million residents of the Gaza Strip can seem incomprehensible the ''bottomless hatred of wild beasts'', as Sheinin put it.
Why do the Palestinians fire rockets at civilians in Sderot, Ashkelon and Ashdod?
Because that's where they come from. Only about a fifth of the Gaza's population is descended from people who lived there before 1948. The rest are people, or the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people, who were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war, or simply fled in fear and were not allowed to go home. Their former homes were mostly in the south of former Palestine, in places such as Sderot, Ashkelon and Ashdod.
This does not give them the right to launch rockets at the people who now live in those towns, of course, any more than Israel has the right to use its massive air power to pound the crowded Gaza Strip. But it does provide some context. This struggle is still about what it has always been about: the land. And the fact that Israel is killing a hundred Palestinians for every dead Israeli does not mean the Israelis are winning.
Ehud Olmert, Israel's interim Prime Minister, and Tzipi Livni, his s successor as head of the Kadima party, and Binyamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud party and her principal rival for the prime ministership in next month's Israeli election, all know that. They are all old enough to have watched Israel try to bash the Palestinians into submission half a dozen times before, and they know it does not work. But that is strategy, and this is politics.
For Israel's political leaders, this is mainly about looking tough in front of an electorate that just wants someone to ''do something'' about the Palestinians and their rockets. Nothing much can be done, short of a peace settlement generous enough to reconcile them to the loss of their land, but Israeli politicians have to look like they are trying.
Hamas leaders are equally cynical, since they know that every civilian death, and even every militant's death, helps to build popular support for their organisation. The dead are pawns, and the game is politics.
There is a more profound issue behind it all, which is Israel's right to exist versus the right of the Palestinians to their homeland, but we shouldn't get carried away with the unique moral dimension of all that. It's just one more conquerors-versus-previous-inhabitants conflict.
Israel has the power to hammer the Palestinians endlessly, but they don't give up and go away. They cannot, and neither can the Israelis. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conflict will ultimately be settled by peaceful negotiation and compromise. It may mean that there will be no solution of any sort for the foreseeable future, just an endless series of bloody, indecisive clashes like the present one.
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