Hamas is a compromised puppet mafia gang used to frighten average Israelis into compliance with foreverwar policies and Big Brother Likud societal repression. Whenever Likud needs to lock up an election or push legislation through lo and behold a few cruddy Hamas fireworks fall from the sky onto the settler territories, the settlers are already hyper-political and partisan, they go on Israeli news shrieking about the holocaust and anti-semitism, and whatever the Israeli right needs passes in the Knesset. It's a racket.

There was a conspiracy between military intelligence and actors within Likud that either set the events of the Rabin assassination into motion or cunningly profited from them and this conspiracy basically set the groundwork for a military first Fortress Israel and its attendant propaganda regime. The consequences on Israeli society, societal levels of trust, Jewish culture, and much else have been disastrous. It also led to many of the issues regarding the conjunction between the American right and the Israeli right.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5755227&forum_id=2...id.#49135011)

Same deal with the Morgenthau plan and the Germans after WW2. It's not *really* the peoples' fault and obviously this situation with Israel isn't as dire as that was

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5755227&forum_id=2...id.#49135076)

i have sympathy in the same way that you have sympathy for a clearly battered housewife

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5755227&forum_id=2...id.#49139248)