Israel, Hamas and Change

I woke up today with 45 new twitter messages that had arrived between 1am and 8am. I hoped that my friends had just been drunk tweeting all night, but sadly I knew that probably wasn't the case. Instead the news was about Israeli attacks into Gaza, against Hamas, that twitter is now telling me have killed at least 200, and potentially nearly 4 times as many injured.

I don't know the details yet so I don't want to say too much. But Israel has been responding to Hamas in much the same way for a long time. Part of the blame might lie on Hamas refusing to renew the truce, but who really knows. The point is that the same old responses to conflict and geo-political disagreement isn't working. I think that American is waking up to that. I have been reading Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" recently, and will blog about that later, but his economic thesis, that as the world grows and evolves, that as we become more interconnected and dependent, we cannot keep attack problems in the same way applies here as well I think.

I'm going to read more about the attacks and maybe once I educate myself I will be singing a different tune. But I hope for all out sake that people find new ways of resolving conflicts that don't involve 1,000 casualties and rocket attacks.


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