Sarai,
Consider what happened in this country just a few months ago when the DC snipers shot 13 (was that the number? I forget already!) people. Individuals. Not groups. Schools were put on lockdown. People hired others to fill their gas tanks. It was all our wonderful news shows could talk about, even with an important election and the ongoing threat of war with Iraq looming.
Magnify it. Imagine if each of those "shots" was a pretty powerful bomb in a crowded area in downtown DC. Or NYC. Or Chicago. Or LA. Or even in smaller cities or towns. And you didn't know where the next one would go off. And you knew that a certain fairly identifiable group--most of them non-citizens and foreign to America--was responsible for it because they blame you for all their troubles. (I say "fairly identifiable" here because many Israelis and Palestineans look so much alike--remember a Newsweek cover about 6 months ago which showed a Palestinean teenager who carried a bomb and her Israeli victim--the two of them almost looked like sisters.) And many of that group of people live in what are essentially ghettoes of those cities, which can be identified and fenced off.
Why on earth do you think that any country in the world wouldn't do what the Israelis are doing? Except in most countries, it would probably be even harsher treatment. I am certainly not excepting the US from that. The anger and violence that would directed at this group if such things happened here would be unimaginable. Consider that in the past, what is it now, three years, there still have been fewer Palestinean deaths than died in the WTC. Consider that until the past ten years, there were something like 2,000 murders per year in NYC alone.
What Sharon is doing is bad. What is happening to the Palestineans and the Israelis alike is bad. But put what is happening into some perspective. It isn't simply that the Israelis are being monsters here. The Palestineans have a hand in their own wounds. At least the Palestinean leadership does. As do the Arab leaders in other countries that egg them on by holding out the hope of the destruction of Israel. As do the European countries that practiced imperialism for so many centuries and set up a world "order" in its wake that is a basket case in so many areas, including much of the mideast today.
Some problems are set up in such a way as to make any solution next to impossible, and when people are unwilling to compromise to get a second, third, or even fourth best solution, they get a 20th, 30th, or 40th best solution. Many political problems are like that, in case you haven't noticed.
Sam
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