Detroit News editor: ‘Close ears to outcry over dead Palestinian children’

The editor is right that children will always die in military actions, but as the USA proved so dramatically in Afghanistan, you cannot stop terrorism with military force. Israel cannot trap hundreds of thousands of refugees, cut off their power, medicine, food and water for months, then start bombing them and expect that this will reduce the kind of fear and hatred that breeds terrorism.

By turning it's back on international and Israeli law, the Geneva conventions and Hamas' calls for a peace settlement, Israel is showing the world it will not honor legal claims and will not be swayed by diplomacy; what does that leave?

The USA should stop sending them billions of dollars *and* fighter planes, tanks, missiles, bombs and other weapons to be used to further this insanity.

I agree with the basic analysis, but I would instead ask if Zionists in the Israeli government would *want* to escape the 'paradox'. As the last few decades has shown, they can act with ever-increasing impunity. They have nothing to fear from the world because the USA and to a lesser degree, Europe, defends them from any legal or diplomatic ramifications of their actions. Thanks to us, they have a steady supply of free billions injected directly into their economy and a huge and solid trading partner for their goods and services. They have land and resources for the taking as long as their people don't pay too much attention to what's happening and get squeamish. And also thanks to us they have one of the best equipped and most powerful militaries in the world, not to mention nuclear weapons, so they have little to worry about militarily. They are getting what they want, day by day, year by year; arable land, water, and the ability to increasingly clear it of anyone they don't want. Why would they want to stop? Particularly when they have another US president who has pledged undying and *unconditional* loyalty to Israel?

One of the regular commenters at FireDogLake.com had a pithy point that rings true:

Israel is in a classic colonizer’s paradox. It would like to put in place a political and security structure in the territories it occupies, that it can deal with on its terms. But for any political leaders and security forces to have any legitimacy in the eyes of the subject population, they must be willing to oppose the colonizer. As a result, the colonizing country always ends up destroying genuine homegrown leadership and is left with either a group of collaborationists with no credibility or an increasingly radicalized opposition –as each succeeding group of leaders is done away with. Yet Israel has persisted in replaying this paradox over and over again for decades. It has steadfastly refused to allow any distinct leadership to form in the Territories.

At the same time, it is unclear if the Territories ever could have been economically and politically viable on their own but it is evident today that they are basket cases and that their viability is now impossible. Beyond this are the demographics. Israel is effectively incarcerating a huge and growing fraction of the population that lives on the land it controls. It has been doing so for 40 years but at some point the apparatus of that prison system will become too expensive or too shameful to maintain and it will collapse. Pressures on this system will only increase with the worldwide economic downturn, the relative drying up of American aid, and the sheer number and wants of Israel’s subject population.

To escape the paradox, they cannot return to the same approaches they've used in the past as this merely escalates and ratchets up the cycle. It's the very definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.