But I thought this had been solved?

Funny that this current round of violence in Gaza should take place a mere matter of days after my post (don't bother looking for it) about how Hot 97's Peter Rosenberg had made a glib, dismissive comment about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his roundtable discussion about Busta Rhymes' "Arab Money," and about how that may have had to do with the fact that he's the son of a member of the Israel Lobby.

That part of the world had been on my mind due to my having read about the humanitarian crisis that had been going on in Gaza, where Israel had cut off the supply of food and water, and various other important resources into Gaza, and so people there were starving to death, even more so than usual. Then Israel wouldn't even let people out, if they needed treatment for cancer, or kidney dialysis and what have you. So a veritable shedload of people were dying from things they might not have died from otherwise. It was a fucking disgusting thing to read about. It definitely wasn't any laughing matter.

Still, I had no idea a war was about to break out. In retrospect, the dead giveaway should have been when they kicked all of the humanitarian aid workers and the media out of Gaza the other day. At the time, I figured this may have just been a matter of Israel not wanting the rest of the world to know just how dire the situation in Gaza was about to get. You know how fucked the fuck up it is there on a regular basis. I'm sure you guys saw that story in the Times I linked to about kids who live on top of huge landfills and spend their every waking hour digging through Israeli refuse, in order to make what amounts to maybe a few dollars a day. Er, maybe you didn't.

But as it turns out, this may have just been an effort to get any sympathetic westerners out of the way before the bombs started going off. Also, from what I've heard, Israel put the word out to their own people that they didn't want to be anywhere near Gaza this week. (Sound familiar?) I didn't hear about this until after the fact, but I wonder if there was any effort made to guard this information from the people in Gaza, or if they were just counting on not a lot of people there having the Internets. I know they don't seem to be as up on Tumblr as we are here in the States. I wonder if this slaughter was as much of a surprise to them as it was to me. I guess it's not like there was anywhere they could go, even if they did know to flee.

If you listen to news reports about these attacks, even in the western media, which I thought was supposed to be controlled by the Israel Lobby, just like the government, all you hear about is stories of innocent civilians getting blown the fuck up. I haven't even heard about anyone from Hamas getting blown up. Which is not to say that Israel hasn't hit any of its ostensibly intended targets. I'm just saying. At the very least, their accuracy rate is a bit off. Part of which I'm sure has been due to the fact that Gaza is supposedly the most densely populated area on earth. You can hardly drop a bomb anywhere on it and not blow someone to smithereens, regardless of whether they had it coming.

Which begs the questions: a) Was Israel just indiscriminently dropping bombs anywhere in Gaza, or did there just so happen to be a shiteload of innoncent civillians near their intended targets? and b) If they knew at least as much about Gaza as I do, i.e. not a whole lote, was it a part of their plan all along to take out so many innocent civillians, or was there any effort made to reduce the amount of collateral damage? Israel is supposed to be a leader in all of that high tech spy technology and what have you, right? There was even that Steven Spielberg movie about those guys avenging the attacks at the '72 Olympics in Munich. How come they couldn't have just sent in Eric Bana? He could have hit who they needed to hit and avoided wasting so many children.

For their part, Israel claims that these attacks have been in response to Hamas launching missiles over the border into Israel. But I've heard conflicting claims with regard to this matter. The guy from Electronic Intifada claims that Hamas didn't launch so much as a single missile into Israel. At the very least, these current attacks seem to be entirely out of proportion to whatever it is they're retaliating against. Something tells me that, if Hamas had killed 225 Israelis in a single day, we would have heard about it in the liberal Jew-run media. ('90s babies and other assorted cultural illiterates, don't respond to that line. It wasn't for you.) And if you've been following this mess for any amount of time, you know that's how it usually works. Collective punishment and casualties all out of the proportion is the name of the game.

Finally, I guess there's the question of whether or not these attacks will have their intended effect. Israel claims they're blowing up Gaza because Hamas keeps fucking with Israel. If Israel drops enough bombs on Gaza, will Hamas be like, "Dude, we might need to stop fucking with these Israelis?" I guess, if Israel blows up enough shit, they won't have any choice in the matter, at least in the short run. But I'm at a loss for how this is gonna make them any safer in the long run. And obviously, my main concern is what effect, if any, this might have on me personally. I know the Internets service can't be too good over there at present, but hopefully people in the Arab world will read this post and see that I'm not down with what's going on over there. I'm not suggesting they blow up anything here in the US. Lord knows we've already got our share of problems. But if they do, they'd be better off aiming that shit at Hot 97 than my mom's basement.