If popular media alone were an uninformed person's only source of information regarding the Israeli war with Hamas in Gaza, they would be confused at best.

On the one hand, they have heard that Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, which probably means they're not the best people in the world. On the other hand, they see Israeli tanks, fighter jets and other components of their well-funded high-tech military going up against what appears to be a rag-tag band of devoted freedom fighters, including boys armed with nothing but stones which kinda seems unfair. What is one to believe?

Here are 5 facts that will clarify the situation and help put it into perspective:

1) Who is Hamas - Hamas, the elected leaders of the Palestinian people, is an organization that has the single-minded goal of destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamic republic. This is proudly and clearly stated in their official founding charter. Hamas does not, has never wanted and never will want peace with Israel. You can read Hamas' charter here. Per its very own charter, there is no possible long-term peace treaty that Hamas will ever accept with Israel, regardless of the specifics. This has nothing at all to do with anything Israel has done or can do in the future, rather it has only to do with the fact that Israel exists.

Hamas trains Palestinian citizens to hate Jews, trains children to use machine guns, glorifies suicide bombings that kill Israeli civilians, publicly executes any Palestinian who openly expresses a desire for peace with Israel, and generally promotes a culture of suicide, death and murder.


You can see a CBS News report on some their childrens' educational programs here. It is essential to understand that Hamas is not just some normal government that is innocently looking out for the well being of its citizens; on the contrary, it welcomes its own civilian casualties to further its goals. Hamas does not value its children -if it did, it would not use them as human shields, store munitions in schools and launch military operations from hospitals. While Hamas deliberately targets Israeli children and other innocent civilians, it knows that Israel tries hard to avoid such targets. By using children as human shields, Hamas tries to use Israel's own sense of humanity against them.

By any moral standard, Israel is clearly acting in self-defense when it destroys a store of rockets whose only purpose is to fire upon Israeli towns. When Israel does so they call ahead, drops leaflets and do whatever they can to warn civilians of an impending attack; however when these efforts fail and civilians are killed, Hamas considers it a strategic gain due to the resulting public outcry and international condemnation against Israel. Clearly the moral blame should fall on Hamas for the death of the children they use as shields.

2) Israel Wants Long Term Peace - Unlike Hamas, Israel desperately wants a lasting peace. If Israel were out to conquer its neighbors it could easily take over Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and others, just as easily as the U.S. could conquer Mexico and Canada. The reason they don't is the same reason we don't: They are a modern Democracy that just wants to be left alone to enjoy life.

3) Israeli Withdrawal - Under the delusion that Palestinians also wanted peace, in 2005, Israel fully withdrew from Gaza, forcibly removing every single Jew from the area and completely surrendering the territory to the Palestinians in hopes that it would end Hamas' rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

4) Increased Attacks - In response to Israel's massive gesture of peace (but in complete accordance with Hamas' founding charter), after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas increased its rocket attacks on Israel. Since the Israeli withdrawal, Hamas has shot over 3,000 unprovoked rockets randomly into Israeli towns.

5) The Accusation of Disproportionate Force - Many critics (and even media outlets) complain about 'disproportionate force', which is an utterly asinine concept. The disproportion they refer to is that despite the thousands of rockets that Hamas has fired upon Israel, there have been only 4 Israeli deaths vs. 400 Palestinian deaths as a result of the Israeli response so far. This certainly does seem disproportionate -but does that make it wrong? Is Israel somehow obligated to limit its response to firing the same number of rockets at random into Gaza's civilian centers? Would that proportionality somehow be more civilized? Is Israel supposed to kill only one Palestinian for each Israeli that was killed and stop there? Obviously this would be an absurd line of reasoning. Israel's goal is not 'tit-for-tat', rather it is to wipe out Hamas and eliminate the threat. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was not morally obligated to limit its response to the bombing of an equal sized Japanese harbor. Its justified response was all out war without regard to proportionality. In response to 9/11, when the U.S. led allied forces decimated the Taliban in Afghanistan, it did so with overwhelmingly disproportionate force in order to eliminate the dangerous regime, and this was a justified strategy. The next time you hear or read about Israel's disproportionate response remember that it is not a valid point.

With these points in mind, you can watch the news with an informed perspective and see through the spin.

-YPR