A few responses (a new topic later)

First off, thank you, Ben, for pointing out the irrationality in my "Must be said" post.

I want to apologize for putting too much emotion into a political matter.

In this post, I'll describe the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

I should actually praise George W. Bush for his reaction to Hamas' victory. The fact that he said "Democracy opens our eyes, and we should listen to the Palestinian people" is a very brave thing to say for an American president.

He's finally admitting that terrorists are not nameless, faceless, evil devils.
They are real people with real problems, and more often than not, real injustices that have been done them.

Now only if Bush had realized all this back on Sept. 12, 2001...When Palestinians cheered at the destruction of the WTC...He could have avoided a LOT of trouble.

What's the election results are saying is that Palestinians still have a great anger towards Israel, and express it any way they can. This is a true fact, and the reasoning behind it seems obvious to me. Israel did indeed cast the first stone, by invading Palestine against the official, democratic will of the Palestinians, and continuously destroying their homes, farms, and livelihoods and making them second class citizens. The hard facts are below, in three main sections.

To introduce my subject, this fact:

Today, in Israeli schools, teachers are liable to be arrested for reading Palestinian poetry to Jewish children.


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1. Negotiating with Terrorists+++++++
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Let's try a hypothetical situation, one that has a lot of similarities to Israel/Palestine. It takes place in the colonial US. Put Israel and Palestine out of your mind, for now.
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A colony begins to oppress a native people, taking their land The native people become angry with the injustice done them, but aren't as civilized as the colonists and so don't know the best way to express it.

They strike back the only way they know how, in violence. They burn the fields of the colonists.

The colonists meet and decide what to do. Somebody says "Never negotiate with terrorists!" The colonists eventually agree on this.

They go out, and they massacre the natives. There are only a few left, whose only choice is to flee.

The problem is solved.

Was that really the best way to solve the problem?
Would they have reached a better solution if they hadn't considered the natives "terrorists?"
Would they have reached a better solution if they seriously considered why the natives were attacking?

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2. Who started it.==================
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Let's go back to Israel and Palestine.

If you read history of the conflict, you will see two facts.

1. There was a UN-sponsored referendum to the Palestinians on whether or not to give land to Israel. The Palestinians thought about it, and said no. This was a nonviolent, peaceful attempt to avoid a conflict.

2. But the colonists came anyway. Racial Jews had a vote, and a right to a fair trial, while Palestinans, whom the Jewish government murdered, harassed, and abused, had neither. Ariel Sharon himself participated in an event early in Israel's history where an entire village of innocent Palestinians was massacred.

The Palestians put up with all this from 1948 until about the late 1980s (Palestinians actually had little part in the Arab-Israeli wars), peacefully trying to regain their human rights.

By 1990, Palestians began to collectively realize that peaceful resistance wasn't working. So a small minority of them declared Intifada and began to resist with violence.

[I don't think that was their best choice, but the Palestinians had no Gandhi or MLK Jr. Why? Luck? Cultural Inferiority? Hard to say.]"

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=3. Why did Hamas win this election yesterday?=
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Palestians were punished collectively for violence, the same method Stalin used to keep rebellious sentiment down. Most Palestinians, even today, are averse to violence and do not believe in using violence to take back their country. But look at the facts. In the 1990s and 2000s, when Israel began to use collective punishment, this is how it worked:

-Every time a terrorist suspect, never a convicted terrorist, (remember that Palestians have no right to a fair trial) was identified, Israeli bulldozers would go into his town. They would order everyone out of the houses, and bulldoze the entire neighborhood.

This didn't stop the violence. It was only another injustice, and made the Palestinians more angry.

Sometimes the Israelis would take out a(n American-made) military helicopter, and demolish the entire building where they thought the suspect probably lived.

This didn't stop the violence. It was only another injustice, and made the Palestinians more angry.

Sometimes they would arrest, torture, kill, or destroy the home of the suspect's family. Good, honest, innocent people died every time.

This didn't stop the violence. It was only another injustice, and made the Palestinians more angry.

Israel would also use torture on Palestinians to extract information. Remember again, Palestinians have no human rights.

This didn't stop the violence, though. So Israel then built walls to keep out the "terrorists."

This didn't stop it either, though. Palestinans now couldn't get to their offices in order to work. Many more had homes and/or farms bulldozed to clear the way for the wall.

Israelis thought about this problem for a while. Then they decided
on a solution.

Every time someone fired a rocket over one of the walls, Israeli bulldozers would go around to the other side, and destroy the whatever they found (usually farms). Good, honest, innocent people had their life's investment destroyed by this.

This didn't stop the violence. It was only another injustice, and made the Palestinians more angry.

Israeli military officials used (and in large part, continue) to use collective punishment. This means:

"We know that a [group] person did the crime. So, let's punish everyone who's [group]. It's so much faster than figuring out who actually committed the crime and giving them a fair trial, and hopefully it intimidates the enemy."

Stalin would apply this technique to which ever group contained the rebel element.
It worked well for him, because his punishment was always death. He killed over 20 million people this way.

Israel applies this technique to whichever race contains the rebel element.
However, they don't use death as the punishment. They just use humiliation and destruction of property on a huge scale. This makes the technique ineffective. The Palestinians just get more and more desperate as a result.

Israeli strategists cannot seem to realize this. It baffles me! To solve the conflict, they must either

• Murder every Palestinian man, woman, and child
  

or

• reconcile the Palestians' grievances, compromise by compromise.
  

But they don't do either!

As I said initially, hopefully this Hamas election will show them the truth. It seems GWB has finally taken a lesson from it, however small, and for that I am glad.

(A better president would have known it from the first time he read a history of the region, though... ;)

More later, and sorry for the length....: )