I came across a moving and insightful blog post from the mother of an Israeli soldier. First she writes about the people in the UN school that Israel bombed yesterday.

Everyone in that building yesterday KNEW that the school was being used as a launching ground…and yet, apparently not one of those thought it would be a smart thing to leave.

…And the people who now mourn the “innocents” who died in yesterday’s attack on the United Nations school don’t question why people remained in the building from which these weapons were fired. They don’t question that this defies human instinct and certainly what should have been every parent’s first reaction.

She goes on:

People will ask how it is that I don’t blame Israel and the answer is simple. Fire came from that building. Call it what you want – a school, a refuge, a mosque, a home…if you shoot at an enemy…common sense would say the enemy will shoot back. Do it from inside a mosque, and the mosque becomes a target. Do it from inside a school, and the school becomes a target. Do it from behind your citizens and families, and you show the true nature of your society, your culture, your cause.

The nature of their society is sick and evil. As many people have been pointing out, the Palestinians’ goal is to kill civilians, both Israel’s and their own. Israel’s goal is to get Hamas to stop attacking them; they target the attackers, but kill civilians only because the attackers ALWAYS locate themselves among civilians.

So this woman shows pictures to illustrate what Hamas and their supporters are like. We don’t post pictures here at RRW, so you’ll have to go to the link to see them, and it’s well worth going. First, “the images they show.” The suffering children. Then, “the images they don’t show.” A long string of photos — a little boy holding a grenade, children trampling on the American and Israeli flags, forming an army, throwing rocks, with fake blood on their hands, and so on — in other words, being trained for their future. She ends:

And what they forget to tell you – is the people who allowed these many pictures to happen, the ones who posed these children with guns, painted their hands with “blood” and strapped “explosive belts” to their bodies, the ones who raise them to believe death should be attained for the glory of God and the more Jews and heathens and infidels you take with you, the higher your place in Heaven – they are the ones responsible for the horror that happened yesterday because they are the ones who put hundreds of people into a place that should have been a sanctuary and then they turned it into a launching ground.

Thank you, Soldier’s Mother, for your perspective.

Natan Sharansky, ex-Soviet dissident, ex-Israeli government minister, and continuing perceptive commentator, has an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal today on the Palestinian problem we’ve written about so frequently.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing. Here are some important excerpts:

On the current clash:

On one side, there is the Israeli army. Technologically and militarily superior, its soldiers are motivated by a powerful commitment to their country’s security. On the other, there are Palestinian terrorists whose aim is to kill as many innocent Israelis as possible by unleashing missiles and suicide bombers on civilian centers. Then, when Israel retaliates, they appeal to the world with gruesome images of Palestinian suffering as part of a global campaign to prevent Israel from defending itself.

Sooner or later, the tactics of the Palestinian terrorists work. The voices of protest in response to Palestinian suffering grow louder until international pressure stays Israel’s hand.

On the Palestinian leaders’ policies of using their civilians, especially children, as a weapon against Israel — and the connection with their policies on their “refugees”:

Of course, it is easy to blame Hamas. It is they, after all, who deliberately put their weapons caches in mosques, their rocket launchers in schoolyards, and their command centers in hospitals — all with the explicit goal of maximizing the tragedy of an Israeli response.

Yet Hamas is not the only Palestinian group at fault. In 2005, shortly after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, I met with the chief of staff to the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. My question to him: Now that we have uprooted thousands of Jews and empowered Gazans to be masters of their own fate, can we hope that within a year’s time there will be fewer refugees in the camps? “Absolutely not,” he said. “The refugees will be relocated only in the context of the final status [agreement]. How can we move them if we do not know where they will live? Maybe they will live in Israel.”

…the Palestinian Authority, the most moderate among Palestinian political groups, would not consider easing their own people’s plight in the wake of Israel’s compromise. This is because the suffering of the refugees is essential to their broader political struggle.

And this strategy is very successful in much of the West:

Soon after my meeting with Mr. Abbas’s chief of staff, I met with the ambassador of one of the West’s most enlightened countries. I asked: Why are the Palestinians not willing to help their own refugees? “I can understand them,” he answered. “After all, they don’t want the refugee problem to be taken off the agenda.”

This reflexive “understanding” for the Palestinian leaders’ abuse of their own people is the heart of the problem. For decades, the international community has actively assisted in building the terrorists’ unique system of control — over where Palestinians live and in what conditions, and over what they think — by allowing terrorists to turn the refugee camps into the center of the Palestinian war machine. Instead of working to relieve the refugees’ misery, the United Nations has dedicated an entire agency, UNRWA, to perpetuating it. For the rest of the world’s refugees, the U.N. works tirelessly to improve their conditions, to relocate them, and to help them rebuild their lives as quickly as possible. With the Palestinians, the U.N. does exactly the opposite, granting refugee status to the great-grandchildren of people displaced in 1948, doing nothing to dismantle the camps, and acting as facilitators for the terrorists’ goal of grinding an entire civilian population under their thumb. Nowhere on earth do terrorists get so much help from the Free World.

Following up on my post of January 1, Intending to help Palestinians, U.S. pours money into terrorist front agency, I want to link to a terrific post on Gates of Vienna by Baron Bodissey, UN-Funded Jihad, also about UNRWA, the UN agency that is supposed to take care of the Palestinian “refugees.”  He shows an anti-Israel press release that UNRWA had ready to go the moment Israel began its military action in Gaza.  

Then he posts an article, “Palestinian rockets, thanks to our tax money,” translated from the Dutch, which gives a good account of the damage UNRWA has done and is doing to the cause of peace between the Palestinians and Israel, which the “international community” and the UN claim to care so much about. It concludes: “With our tax money therefore we keep that conflict alive. ”

I recommend you read the whole thing.

Addendum: UNRWA stands for United Nations Relief and Works Agency.