Bush said Hamas had worsened living conditions in Gaza. "By spending its resources on rocket launchers instead of roads and schools, Hamas has demonstrated that it has no intention of serving the Palestinian people," Bush said.

≈ Cross-posted from my diary -- Breaking News: Israel Ground Forces Enter Gaza ≈

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

And Obama was silent, you know, one President at a time.

And Bush ran off his mouth from 4000 miles away, proving that he is a monster, and wanting everyone else to be a monster too.

and the rest of them?  Oh fie, maybe they should stop this, but let's not let it interfere with supper.

  The ground operation came after Israel had already intensified its assault on Gaza earlier in the evening, firing artillery shells for the first time and killing at least 11 people in an attack on a mosque in Beit Lahiya that the Israeli military said was being used for attacks on Israel. Television footage in the afternoon showed overwhelmed hospital doctors in Gaza struggling to keep up as paramedics brought in one victim after the next. Grief-stricken relatives of the dead wailed and threw their hands to the sky, as ambulances with sirens blaring continued to pull up at the hospital entrance.

Late in the afternoon, Israel dropped leaflets over northern Gaza urging residents to leave their homes. The leaflets read: "Area resident, as result of the acts undertaken by terror activists in your area against Israel, the IDF is forced to respond immediately and operate in this area. For your own safety, you are asked to leave the area immediately."
  It was unclear where the residents were supposed to go; Gaza is tiny, and no part of the strip, home to 1.5 million people, has been spared from attack during the past eight days.

   People must be terrified. This is a nightmare and with U.S. weapons. What will Israel do after invading and killing a bunch of people? Leave immediately? Stay for a year or five or ten? Israel needs to come to a political settlement with the Palestinian people. Where will this lead? It will lead to another endless, hopeless nowhere with a lot of innocent Gazans getting murdered on the way.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; now we know that it is bad economics;" - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

"all Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, including the armed wing of the Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas' al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, have continued to launch rockets from Gaza into southern Israel."

Oooops! It seems that their boys from Fatah have been firing rockets too. What are they gonna do now?

Helena has studied Hamas for years, and has written extensively about it. She interviewed the elected Hamas leaders in March, 2006, and traveled to Damascus in January, 2008 to interview the Hamas leader Khalid Mash`al. One of the advantages of Helena's writing about Hamas as about most other things, is that she has a realistic approach that is not distorted by the usual negative bias found in most western analysis.

I recommend reading the whole article, plus her other writings which she links to in the article. Here are some excerpts:

"Most people in the west have been wilfully mis- or dis-informed about Hamas and believe either that it is made up of wild-eyed men of violence who perpetrate violence for its own sake, or that its main goal is the violent expulsion of all Jewish people from Israel/Palestine.

"These impressions are quite misleading.Yes, Hamas has used significant amounts of violence against Israelis since it was founded in 1987. But so too has Israel, against Hamas. Indeed, Israel has killed many times more Hamas supporters and leaders than Hamas has ever killed Israelis. Does that mean we understand Israelis to be only "mindless, wild-eyed men of violence"? No. For both sides, we need to try to understand what they seek to achieve with the violence they use; as well as the conditions under which they can be expected to moderate or end it."

...................

"It is worth noting upfront that the large-scale escalation was the one that was launched by Israel, yesterday. What Hamas had done, prior to that, was not launch any particularly new surges of violence; mainly, it announced it would not be renewing the six-month-long ceasefire (tahdi'eh) it had maintained, by mutual agreement, with Israel since last June. That, after numerous significant Israeli infractions of the ceasefire, especially since November.

"So Question 1 here might be: Why, precisely, did Hamas decide it would not renew the ceasefire? That question probably needs more studying. Israel's violations in the ceasefire's last weeks are presumably one factor. But if Hamas really wanted the ceasefire renewed, was there more it could have done to try to negotiate that? I don't know. One thing I do recall, though, is some angry accusations by Hamas spokesmen in recent weeks that the Egyptian government officials who in the first half of the year had worked long and hard to broker the June ceasefire had ceased (in Hamas's view) to play an "honest broker" role, and were putting pressure on Hamas to continue the ceasefire on terms much more favorable to Israel than during the first ceasefire."

She goes on to discuss Hamas' broader strategy over the last few years, and then summarizes this way:

"So what, at the end of the day, do the Hamas leaders want? They want, firstly, what all other other people in the world want: the ability to nurture and build their national community in their own national homeland free of the threat of violence, encirclement, and siege from any outside powers. They want their land and resources to be free of the threat of being expropriated by any outside power. They want free access to their holy places and the ability to exercise control over them. They want satisfactory redress or restitution for the injustices of the past.

"These aims are not so different from what most Israelis want for themselves, too. Are the national goals of Israelis completely incompatible with those of the pro-Hamas Palestinians? I don't think so. In an environment in which the equal humanity and the basic needs of all people are respected, people of good will could certainly see a way in which the claims of Hamas's Palestinian supporters and those of Israelis could all be met to a degree sufficient to allow the continued peaceful coexistence between the two peoples within the land that to which both are deeply attached.

"...the notion that the claims of Jewish Israelis should everywhere and always be completely privileged over those of Palestinians is an anachronism in today's world. It is an anachronism, true, that has been upheld for many decades now by the US...But it's an anachronism that can't be given continued credence in the international system for very much longer."

"What the Israeli governments do not realize is that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah need Israel. It is Israel that needs them, and needs them desperately. If Israel wants not to become a Crusader state that is in the end extinguished, it is only Hamas and Hezbollah that can guarantee the survival of Israel. It is only when Israel is able to come to terms with them, as the deeply-rooted spokespersons of Palestinian and Arab nationalism, that Israel can live in peace".

-- What Can Israel Achieve?, by Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University; 1 Aug 2006.