One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

In the spring of 1943, the victorious Soviet Russian army had rolled back the remains of the German wehrmacht to the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Nazis had sealed up over 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis had been systematically exterminating the Polish Jewish community in the concentration camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. The Warsaw ghetto Jews knew they were destined for extermination by the Nazis, so armed with pistols and a few machine guns they revolted on April 19, confident that the Russian army would arrive in time to liberate them. Instead, in one of the most obscenely cynical actions in his bloodstained career, Stalin ordered his army to pause on the outskirts of Warsaw, to allow the Nazis time to crush the Warsaw uprising. Stalin didn't like Jews. By May 18, the Nazis had defeated the Warsaw Jews, and accelerated their extermination program. I was 15 at the time and remember vividly how all of us in the western alliance were appalled and watched helplessly as this tragedy took place. We called the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto courageous freedom fighters. The Nazis called them terrorists.

Now, for 8 years, the Israelis, including perhaps a few survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, have bottled up 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, an area of land about the size of the National Capital territory of Ottawa. A small faction  of the Palestinians, the Hamas "terrorists"/"freedom fighters" [you choose] is fighting fiercely in an attempt to draw the world's attention to the plight of all the Palestinian people deprived of basic freedoms we all support, in the Gaza strip. Hamas is armed with small rockets that have no guidance system, carry very small explosive charges, do slight property damage and have killed or injured less than a dozen  people in Israel. They have also dug many tunnels under the separation wall and fences between Gaza and Israel, but if these have been used to make incursions into Israel, there are no reports of damage, deaths, or injuries as a result. 

Nonetheless, the Israeli Defence Force has retaliated against these irritating pinpricks with a massive air, land and seaborne assault in which as of today, almost 2000 Palestinians have been killed, many thousands injured, densely packed residential districts have been laid waste, essential infrastructure including Gaza's only power plant, have been destroyed. The overwhelming majority of those killed and injured Palestinians are non-combatant infants, children, women and old men. Hospitals and schools, including schools run by UNRWA that were sheltering thousands of Palestinians whose homes had been destroyed, have been targets for aerial and land-based bombardment. This is collective punishment on a grand scale, a Nazi tactic that the IDF has copied. 

President Obama, and of course Canadian prime minister Harper, have said repeatedly that the Israelis have a right to defend themselves.  Do the people of Palestine not also have a right to defend themselves? 

This perpetual war between Israel and Palestine is a tragedy of Sophoclean proportions, writ large. I can see no sign of a solution in my short remaining lifetime and I suspect there may be no solution even in the lifetime of my grandchildren.