By Stan Goodenough
Feb 22, 2008
Israel may have unilaterally ended what the world called its occupation of the Gaza Strip, tearing its own citizens out of their homes and communities there and giving the territory to the Palestinian Arabs so that they could begin to build their Arab state;
And Israel may have endured, since leaving Gaza, thousands of terrorist rocket attacks on its people in Sderot and in other parts of the western Negev;
The Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, elected in Jimmy Carter certified "free and fair elections" by a sweeping majority of the Palestinian Arabs, may have self-destructed and wrested control of Gaza in a vicious and bloody coup;
Hamas may have vowed to continue doing everything possible to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state adjacent to it;
The Arab terrorists may have built and hid their rockets in civilian populated areas and fired them from civilian built-up areas;
Israel may have restricted itself, in the face of relentless, daily terrorizing of its citizens, to carrying out targeted killings of terrorist individuals and cells, instead of sending its tanks and soldiers into Gaza en masse, or carpet bombing Gaza city neighborhoods into the ground;
Israel may have, despite the havoc being wreaked by the Kassam rockets and mortar shells, continued to allow electricity and fuel to flow into Gaza, providing its sworn enemies there with power, light and heating during this past winter;
In order to spare the lives of thousands of Israel-hating Arabs, the Olmert government may have responded in a more restrained, humane and responsible way to terrorism than any other country on earth has ever done:
But as far as the European Union is concerned, Israel has "failed" the people of Gaza and is guilty of collectively punishing them.
The invariably pro-Arab EU hauled Israel over the coals in an adopted resolution Thursday, saying the "policy of isolation of the Gaza Strip has failed at both the political and humanitarian level" and ruling that "the civilian population should be exempt from any military action and any collective punishment."
"The European Parliament calls on Israel to cease military actions killing and endangering civilians, and extrajudicial targeted killings."