Books_and_Cleverness

I do hear you but I've been following this conflict quite closely since 2000 and IMHO the news being reported this way is a recent phenomenon. I distinctly recall watching CNN and MSNBC in 2002 2003 and both were reporting for several minutes on one Israeli injured by a car bomb. On the bottom of both channels, in the news ticker, was one sentence mentioning that an Israeli bulldozer crushed an American citizen to death because he she was standing in front of it, protesting the destruction of a Palestinian settlement. (Edit: Here's the story, some details are contested. Thanks guys.)

Maybe I'm mistaken, but my honest opinion is that Israel feels increasingly isolated because international tolerance for what they're doing (right or wrong, justified or not) is degrading.

It's just super hard to look at a place like Gaza (seriously, just google image search it, it's a humanitarian wasteland) and sincerely believe that the people living there are morally culpable for the rockets in the same way we hold, say, gangs in Mexico responsible for their violence. Mexicans have robust options in what to do with their lives and choosing violence from among those reasonable options is difficult to comprehend, at least for me.

In the case of Gaza, the nearly complete lack of options may not make the violence acceptable, but it certainly makes it more understandable.

Gaza does not have a functioning economy that can import and export. This is not a place like, say, Venezuela, where economic mismanagement is the obvious source of the suffering.

I'm not defending Hamas, they're a shit organization IMHO, but to pretend more enlightened distribution of resources would resolve this problem seems almost comically far-fetched.

Privatized prisons are, IIRC, like 3% of all prisons and generally dwarfed in comparison to the three she mentioned.

Thanks for reminding me!

Obviously we're all huge fans of science, but they can't be experts on everything. Politicians are dealing with a million different fields and ultimately are more successful when they can manage experts rather than be experts. Truman didn't need to be a physicist to be able to use nuclear fission to end WW2.