West Asia

“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? In Israeli prison, of course!,” was the title of a 2009 article. That was almost exactly one year after Israel’s concluded a major war against Gaza.

There has been a great deal of violence for about a century in the geographic zone we may today call Israel/Palestine. This zone has seen a more or less continuous struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers concerning the rights to occupy land.

To some, US secretary of state John Kerry may have appeared to be a genuine peacemaker as he floated around ideas during a Cairo visit on July 25 about a ceasefire between Israel and resisting Palestinian fighters in Gaza. But behind his measured diplomatic language, there is a truth not even America’s top diplomat can easily hide.

In ongoing raids, the Israeli air force have also destroyed water wells and lengths of pipeline, in the process, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), leaving "hundreds of thousands" of Gazans without adequate hydration.

The use of rockets from Gaza toward Israel and the more deadly use of rockets and bombs by Israeli forces toward Gaza has raised in a dramatic way the possibility of banning rocket use in the Middle East.

When the bodies of three Israeli settlers - Aftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 - were found on June 30 near Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israel went into a state of mourning and a wave of sympathy flowed in from around the world.