Gaza

The Six-Day War in 1967 was the first conflict that I remember reading about in the news. It seemed a clear-cut war to me, at that time. The goodies were Israeli, fighting the massed armies of the Arab world who were the baddies. It seemed only fair that in retaliation for threatening Israel, the Arab states should lose Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Except, of course, that Israel had gotten their retaliation in first.

The politics chimed with my own, as well. The Jews had been massacred by Fascism, which made them automatically left-wing and socialist and therefore correct. And Israel was the home of the Kibbutzim, proto-socialist collective farms and the model for all hippy communes (except that Kibbutzes worked, and involved hard labour) .

Now, the world seems to have changed. The Israelis are the oppressors, the fascists, using superior arms and their support from Republican Americans to invade, starve, and abuse the Palestinians. The invasion of Gaza seems vile. It's a densely populated strip of land, into which all the dispossessed of Palestine have been massed after the illegal seizure of the inhabitants' land and villages. For the sake of a few rockets, fired by the loony wing of a democratically elected council, the Israelis have invaded and murdered hundreds if not thousands.

And the latest atrocity, as reported by the Red Cross, seems to have echoes of earlier conflicts. Civilians were herded into a school which was later shelled. In WW2 it was churches that were turned into mass slaughterhouses by the Nazis, but the principle is the same. It's going to end badly.

:o(