Rodney Mazinter to The Business Day

Dear Sir

Terry Crawford-Browne bandies about words and gives them a pejorative sense either through ignorance or, more likely, malicious intent.

 For example he implies that support for Israel, which is what Zionism means, is somehow disreputable. Far from being cowed many are comforted to know that they share with many millions of Jews, Christians, and races of every hue an admiration for the country. As a matter of fact millions of non-Israeli citizens (a silent majority) are pretty proud of their support for an ethical, moral country that more than pays its dues in a world beset by hatred. 

 His latest foray into unsubstantiated fiction revolves around water. Without giving facts nor producing an iota of evidence he writes about “well documented” accusations . Here are the facts about Israeli established desalination plants around the world:

 California: An award winning plant in Carlsbad for the San Diego Conty Water Authority that provides clean water to about 300,000 people and generates over US$50m annually to the regional economy and earned the prestigious “desalination Deal of the Year Award from Global Water Intelligence, North American Water Deal of the Year from Project Finance Magazine, and Far West Deal of the Year from The Bond Buyer finacial newspaper.

 China: Tianjin Desalination Plant (China’s largest) established by IDE (an Israeli company) composed of a power plant, seawater desalination plant and salt production from brine.

 India: Gujarat Reliance Project, India’s largest desalination plant established from IDE delivers high quality potable water for over 15 years

 And many more around the world.

 Praising IDE’s “faster, more cost-efficient and environment-friendly desalination process”, Fortune hails the “engineering alchemy” that has allowed the company to rise to no. 2 in the Change The World list. This list recognises companies that have had a positive social impact through activities that are part of their core business strategy, rated by level of innovation, measurable social impact and business results.

IDE achieved the number 2 spot (behind GlaxoSmithKline) owing to its pioneering work in the desalination industry, where it is an undisputed technological leader.  Fortune were especially impressed by IDE’s global scale (plants in over 40 countries), and innovations that include a wide range of energy- and cost-efficient desalination processes.

It is not difficult to find such information and more. That Crawford-Browne does not bother indicates laziness, ineptitude, maliciousness or all three.

Allan Wolman to The Daily News

Israel is becoming increasingly isolated writes Dineo Maboe (Daily News 29 may) – indeed isolated with diplomatic relations increasing in Africa, South America and Asia on a daily basis – in fact India recently honored the Israeli PM with its highest award on his recent visit there.

Isolated indeed with more international entertainment artists visiting and performing almost weekly in Israel. Just recently the Giro Italia International Cycle Tour first three days were held in Israel – the first time in the history of this race that the start has been held outside of Italy. On the contrary Mr. Maboe if you did your research properly you might have arrived at a very much different conclusion.

Trade relations between Israel and the international community have been elevated by the recognition of her currency as an internationally accepted currency. Israeli goods and technical know-how a sought-after commodity worldwide also attests to Israeli relations expanding like never before.

It seems that Maboe takes issue with the honesty of Gareth Cliff as well as a host of others who exposes the Hamas’s tactics of using children as human shields – something that the worlds media is now getting wise to.

Please can Maboe give some examples of his claim that Israel practices “blatant racism and gross human rights abuse”. If Maboe again researched his subject with a tad more accuracy he would to his dismay discover that both racism and human rights abuse are the norm in Gaza where extra judicial executions of Palestinians simple suspected of collaboration with Israel are summarily executed by being pushed off high rise buildings to their death. Racism in Gaza and the West Bank is the norm where the Christian population had decreased alarmingly and also no Jew is allowed to enter or live in those territories

Allan Wolman to The Business Day

Terry Crawford-Brown no stranger to the Israel haters club (read Anti-Semitic brigade). Writing in Business Day 30 May, he seems to have such intimate knowledge of how Israel bribes various governments. Arms and other exports between countries is part of normal trade relations such as Iranian arms exports to Syria and Saudi arms exports to certain Gulf States. In fact, almost every industrial country that conducts international trade include arms in their inventory. South Africa is also a producer of armaments which are exported to various countries in Africa and S. America. However, Crawford-Brown (C-B) stigmatizes only one country for this type of trade – wonder why, could it be out of sheer hatred of the Jews – something that C-B has a well-documented record for.

He then mentions Israeli genocide in Gaza – wonder then what he would call the death toll of half a million people in Syria, or a few hundred thousand in Yemen or the DRC? Let’s not forget who organized the Russel Tribunal on Palestine a kangaroo court held in Cape Town a few years back attended by a host of anti-Zionists (again read anti-Semites) which amounted to nothing less than these misguided souls venting their hatred at the Jewish state.

Victor Gordon to The Star

THE STAR

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor,
I refer to the picture included within the article, “We want to return to our land”.

I stand in awe of your extraordinary powers of perception. How clever to realize that a particular Palestinian youth forming part of a group of six boys in various crouching positions, was crying. It’s staggering that in the split second that this picture was taken you were able to discern from his expression that he was in tears and not simply grimacing  before reloading the sling-shot he is holding and directing yet another stone at an Israeli soldier.

Of course I realise that your explanation;  “A Palestinian youth cries during clashes with Israeli forces” is so much more emotive than simply saying “A Palestinian youth clashes with Israeli forces”, which is far less gut-wrenching. But, considering that from Saturday 12 May until Friday 18 May (a mere seven days), The Star published no less than four major articles critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian standpoint,  without a single one emanating from Israel, one should not be too surprised that little plugs of this nature slip through wherever possible.

“Fake News”?  Perhaps not … but slanted news?  Let your readers decide.

Don Krausz to The Mercury

 Dear Sir/Madam,

 Re: Dineo Maboe’s letter of 28/5 on Israel and Archbishop Tutu.

 Over the years I have collected quite a file on His Holiness. He puzzles me. Here is a man who has played a prominent role in South Africa in its fight against apartheid. He lived in this country as an African and therefore suffered the indignities of his people. He must know all about apartheid and yet opines that there is apartheid in Israel that is worse than what was inflicted in this country.

 I arrived here in 1946 after spending years in German concentration camps where almost all my family were murdered. In 1954 I emigrated to Israel and lived there for years. I saw apartheid as it was practised here and was able to make comparisons with its racial persecution and that of the Nazis. During my four and a half years in Israel I saw nothing comparable.

 In Israel I worked within sight of the city of Gaza. My colleagues and I had to have access to arms day and night because of the threat from Fedayeen in Gaza which at the time was under Egyptian control. Our transport was shot up, we had to travel in convoy under strong military guard and lived with armed protection on a 24-hour basis. Even when we went home on leave we were aware of the constant threat of terrorism, whether in the streets, on public transport or even in a restaurant or at a religeous service. Not far from where we worked, at a place called Maale Acrabim, the Height of the Scorpions, a busload of civilians was massacred.

 And so I understand the safety precautions that Israel was forced to take in order to safeguard its citizens. There are some two million people in the country who are not Jews. Many are potential terrorists and have to be prevented from entering residential areas carrying arms and explosives. Hence the stringent controls. It was only when the safety wall was erected outside Palestinian areas that Yasser Arafat’s suicide bombers were stopped after they had murdered at least 1,200 Jewish men, women and children. Separate roads for Israeli and Palestinian traffic reduced the drive-by shootings that were inflicted. After about 14,000 locally manufactured rockets and shipped Iranian longrange missiles were launched from Gaza across the border at Israeli residential areas was a sea blockade effected. When that ordinance reached 80 a day Israel attacked Gaza.

 Inconvenient for the Palestnians? Definitely. Apartheid? That depends on one’s indoctrination. But still preferable to attending funerals and suffering the loss of your nearest and dearest.

 But where does that leave the Archbishop? Is it possible that he is unaware of this? I doubt it. With his biblical and historical knowledge he must also know that Jews have resided in the territory in greater or lesser numbers for the past 3,300 years AND WHAT ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM HAVE MEANT IN THE JEWISH RELIGION AND STILL DO, ESPECIALLY AFTER LOSING ONE THIRD OF ALL THEIR NUMBER AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZIS AND THEIR DEEPLY RELIGEOUS COLLABORATORS. So why does he describe the aforementioned as worse than Verwoerd’s apartheid? He is not unique in this. He must be an intelligent man to have become an Archbishop, BUT EMOTION USUALLY OVERRIDES INTELLECT.

Allan Wolman to the Daily Dispatch

Writing in this newspaper Bantu Mniki (Speaking frankly 23 May) says “there are very few words to describe this massacre except to call it evil”. How then and what would he call the slaughter of half a million Syrians just a few kilometers from Gaza – a statistic? The slaughter of 500,000 Syrians by their own government who as he describes Israel, no longer sees his own people as human beings worthy of life. Please Mr. Bantu Mniki get real and get a perspective on the evil world we live in as it is not only Syria but a host of other nations (Myanmar, DRC, Darfur, Sudan, Yemen etc.) who take the definition of evil to another level. And to help you understand sir, that the Syrians were not smashing down an international border barrier but simply innocent women and children who were mercilessly targeted by the Syrian air force with barrel bombs and chemical weapons.

To help you understand sir, there is sufficient international and graphic evidence of upwards of 30,000 rioters trying to break down a barrier fence separating two countries. A gross violation of international law and Israel had every right to defend her borders. Had any of these Palestinian rioters encouraged by their leadership to “tear out the hearts of the Jews” managed to get through who knows how many Jews would have been killed by these half crazed hated filled people. To help you understand sir, the Hamas leadership by its own admission identified 50 of those 60 killed as Hamas operatives (read militants)

Israel is accused by Mniki of acting with impunity when exercising her moral and civic duty to protect her citizens from the terrorism that has been visited on that country for years and whilst the deaths of those hell bent on creating havoc are regrettable they could have easily been avoided if not for the futile and stupid call to invade a sovereign state with the sole intent to “tear out the hearts of the Jews”. Perhaps Mniki also need to get his definition of a massacre in perspective and lend a bit more focus on the violent murder statistics on our own country which runs at over 1500 deaths per month!

Mniki ends his piece by telling us that every human being is deserving of life dignity and freedom – for a fleeting moment I imagined he was referring to Syria  

Allan Wolman to The Herald

Perhaps Gary Koekemoer might have  considered the following before writing his piece in the Herald?

Israel is without doubt the undisputed military and economic power in the Middle East and boasts one of the strongest army’s in the world. This is common knowledge and especially well known to her enemies. Why then would Hamas the political power of Gaza launch 3 aggressive wars and now try to breach the separation barrier and send hordes of hate filled Palestinians into Israel to “tear their hearts out” against such a powerful force.

With the full knowledge that a rag tag terrorist organization such as Islamic Jihad and other Hamas affiliated groups had absolutely no chance of inflicting any real damage on Israel why would Hamas precipitate such aggression against the powerhouse of the region? The answer is pretty obvious – with no chance of a military victory the only victory Hamas could garner from these conflicts was the buy publicity and world sympathy.

This indeed was more than successful during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, and again in July 2014 during Operation Protective Edge. All three of these conflicts instigated by rocket and mortar attacks on the Southern towns of Israel from Gaza to the point that Israel reluctantly took action to curtail these attacks on their civilian populations, resulting in many Palestinian causalities including children.

This was the clear intention of Hamas to have as many dead and wounded children displayed in front of the international media which buys not only valuable air time but unprecedent sympathy and condemnation of Israel as a pariah state. Interesting indeed that the death of one Palestinian in the “occupied” territories will get more publicity than thousands of Palestinians killed in Syria, and that’s not to mention the almost half a million Syrians murdered by that countries air force bombing the hell out of schools and hospital in places like Aleppo, Homs and Damascus. It seems that the media places a much higher value on the life on a Palestinian killed by Israel than thousands of Palestinians killed by president Assad.

Something that headline hungry media groups can’t get their heads around, and we hear this whenever “disproportionate” Palestinian causality statistics are quoted, is that Israel not only places a much higher value on the lives of her citizens but Israeli law prescribes that every building must have a bomb shelter. Such precautions are absolutely unheard of in Gaza where instead of building similar shelters to protect their civilians, they construct terror tunnels that penetrate underground into Israel for terrorist to ply their macabre trade in surrounding towns and villages of Southern Israel.

Don Krausz to The Daily Dispatch

Dear Sir/Madam,

Re: Bantu Mniki’s article: Israel’s seeds of death should be condemned for what it is by the world.

 Bantu Mniki accuses Israel of murder. He uses the term “massacre.” He refers to an alleged figure of 60 Palestinian dead, including 8 children and a baby, all involved in breaking through Israeli soldiers defending the border of their country against an estimated 50,000 howling, aggressive Palestinians acting  on their own instructions to create mayhem. There was shooting involved. Gazan schools had been closed to provide children as fodder for the “demonstration,” hence the 8 youngsters and one baby killed. What kind of people send children into the line of fire?

 Press photos show clouds of thick black smoke and white teargas fumes. The young Israeli soldiers were behind barbed wire barricades and being bombarded with stones and other missiles.

Their orders were to prevent the attackers with their wire cutters from overcoming them and entering the Israeli civilian settlements just behind the border. It must have been a frightening  and nerve-racking experience for them. Had they not been well trained and adequately supervised, the death toll could well have been much higher.

 What was the background of these soldiers? They knew of the attacks on Jews by Palestinians since 1920 by Arab terrorists who had murdered 24,861 Jews and wounded 35,356. They would have learned of the 1948 war when Israel had declared its own state, following the decision of the League of Nations. Israel had then immediately been attacked by its own local Palestinians and the comparatively well-equipped armies of five neighbouring Arab states. 6,000 Israelis had died and 30,000 wounded in that unprovoked war, one percent of the total Jewish population as reported by the British Encyclopaedia of that time. And how many of these young soldiers had not lost relations and friends over the years or did not know of close family that had been slaughtered in the Holocaust?

 Mniki accuses the government of Israel of an “evil act” for what he terms “no longer seeing Palestinians as human beings worthy of life.” Is he unable or unwilling to see Israelis in the same light and understanding that its soldiers’ first duty was to protect their own citizens? “If there will be danger to lives, we will authorise live fire,’ declared the Israeli Chief of Staff. No such considerations seem to have occurred to the Hamas who sent their youngsters against soldiers.

 Palestinians are calculating, not stupid. This is not the first time that they have sacrificed their young or old for propaganda purposes, knowing from past experience how the foreign press reacts. The same situation took place when Israel was forced to invade Gaza after being bombarded by 80 missiles a day. It found itself faced by armed Gazans hiding behind women and children. The tactic worked just as intended: Israeli troops held their fire.

 Mniki’s education seems lacking in his use of the term “massacre.”

During World War One 1,5 million Armenian men, women and children died at the hands of the Turks. Millions of soldiers died on the battlefields. During World War Two six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, as well as three million Poles and millions of Russians. The Japanese stand accused of murdering eleven million Chinese.

These days millions of civilians are dying all over the world, at least half at the hands of their fellow religionists and including thousands of Israelis by Arabs.

 Those, Mr. Bantu Mniki, are massacres!

 

Rodney Mazinter Right of Reply

Right of reply – Ebrahim Harvey Weekend Argus

Rodney Mazinter (Vice-Chair SAZF-Cape Council)

There’s a refusal by our media and throughout Western countries to acknowledge that Israel is the victim of Arab and Islamic exterminatory violence. Instead, Israel-abusers project that violence onto Israel. It is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs that is said to have driven them in despair to act as they do. So Israel deserves its punishment.

We’ve been watching this sickening spectacle again this week from the usual suspects, many of them with abysmal human rights records: the United Nations and European Union, NGOs, politicians, and above all, the media, including newspapers, radio and TV in South Africa, and now “political writer” Ebrahim Harvey

With the riots in Gaza, they fall over themselves to mouth the murderous script Hamas has given them—that these were spontaneous, peaceful protests against the hellish conditions imposed upon Gaza by Israel, whose soldiers proceeded to kill around 60 unarmed Arabs out of sheer trigger-happy brutality.

In her usual insightful manner,  Melanie Phillips in her latest blog cuts to the chase: “…These were all incendiary lies. The riots that reached a crescendo this week weren’t a protest but, in the words of Hamas itself, an attempted invasion intended to slaughter Jews and destroy Israel.

“On Wednesday last week, a senior Hamas official declared that no fewer than 50 of the 62 said to have been killed were its own operatives. In other words, the Israel Defense Forces had been remarkably careful not to kill the civilians whom Hamas had pushed to the front as cannon fodder. No other army in the world would have been so scrupulous in the face of a murderous mob 40,000-strong trying to storm its border.”

A report published last week by a High Level Military Group of distinguished military figures around the world headed by Col. Richard Kemp CBE, who spent most his life fighting terrorism and insurgency commanding British troops on the front line of some of the world’s toughest hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans and Northern Ireland, describes these onslaughts over the past six weeks as ‘carefully planned and orchestrated military operations intended to break through the border of a sovereign state and commit mass murder in the communities beyond, using their own civilians as cover. The purpose: to criminalise and isolate the State of Israel.’ Yet the media has vilified Israel instead.

Most South African media all but ignored the stark fact that the rioters were armed with IEDs, petrol bombs, burning kites and guns. On Facebook the rioters were urged to “bring a knife, dagger or handgun” in order to kidnap Israeli civilians and murder Israeli soldiers. Our media ignored all this.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) dropped leaflets warning Gazans not to assemble at the fence; then they used tear gas and foul-smelling “Skunk” sprays; then they fired rubber bullets and warning shots; then they shot at legs. They only used lethal force when facing a direct threat posed through weapons or explosives. Our media ignored all this.

Hamas blew up its own fuel terminals three times; it wrecked conveyor belts used to bring in construction materials and animal feed, and when Israel opened the border crossing for humanitarian relief, Hamas sent back trucks of medical aid, food and other supplies.

The Western media ignored all this, blaming Israel for Gaza’s “hellish” conditions grotesquely singling out Israel as an endemic abuser of human rights. This is now the default position in the West. How much is our media complicit in these deaths by false or biased reporting?

Ebrahim Harvey’s article in the The Weekend Argus (Israel – US: axis of imperialist evil?) is a classic example of this. He paints a portrait that is so at odds with the facts in the  Middle East where the murderous intent is the obliteration of an entire state and the murder of its citizens.

Why put Israel up front and centre? This tiny sliver of land is surrounded by 22 Arab countries where there are plentiful pickings for apartheid analogies. There will be found gender apartheid, sexual orientation apartheid, religious apartheid, cultuaral apartheid, employment apartheid, education apartheid, staus of women apartheid, legal apartheid and many more examples, none of which can be found in Israel. His view is dangerous in the current Middle East and is misused by those who are just as antipathetic about the country as he.

Phillips states: “The unanswerable question…is why Israel is abused like this. Plausible factors such as anti-colonialist ideology or plain ignorance don’t begin to explain the unique virulence of this hatred, and its obsessional and paranoid nature.

“The essence of it is the refusal to view Israel as victimised… So if Israel exercises its undoubted military power—even though it only ever does so to defend its citizens’ lives—this gives traction to the ancient anti-Semitic trope.

“Hence the obscene outrage voiced by some that no Israelis were killed at the Gaza border—imbecilically offered as proof of Israeli aggression. The fact that the Jews can now defend themselves is considered unacceptable.”

These Israel-abusers, including Harvey, champion instead those who send flaming kites decorated with swastikas to incinerate Israel and its people, while describing the Jews defending their country as latter-day Nazis.

Reading open-mouthed the resolutions of the UN, its Security Council and Human Rights Council is like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope; what’s up is down, what’s near is far, what’s false is true, and the egregious lies that apply to the one side of the conflict is apportioned to the other. In the conflict on the border with Gaza it is Hamas that seeks to invade Israel not the reverse. It is Hamas that seeks to slaughter Israeli children and women while Israel, showing great restraint, adheres to the ethics of its foundations. It is Hamas that distorts its religion and abandons civilised ethics choosing murder over peaceful coexistence. Jews and Christians have the Ten Commandments to set their moral compass. While Jews look after sick Palestinian children in Israeli hospitals, and provide power, gas and food to Gaza, let us look at the Ten Commandments of Hamas.

1.     “There is no concession to Jerusalem, no alternative to Palestine, and no solution but to return. This is the Palestinian people taking the initiative…” – Ismail Haniyeh,

2.     “Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human, and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise.” – Revised Hamas Charter, 2017 https://fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/880818a.htm

3.     “Over is the time Hamas spent discussing recognising Israel. Now Hamas will discuss when we will wipe out Israel” Yahya Sinwar,

4.     “Removing the Jews from the land they occupied in 1948 is an immutable principle because it appears in the Book of Allah” Mahmoud al-Zahar

5.     “The Jewish state would be wiped away through resistance, or military action. The state will come from resistance, not negotiation. Liberation first, then statehood…. We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem” – Khaled Meshal.

6.     “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one” – Ahmad Bahr.

7.     “Allah, take the Jews and their allies, Allah, take the Americans and their allies … annihilate them completely and do not leave anyone of them” – Yussuf al-Sharafi.

8.     “The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth” – Atallah Abu Al-Subh.

9.     “Hamas will continue the resistance until the last drop of blood” – Fawzi Barhoum.

10.   “These are the founding Hamas principles on which we raise our children and in which we believe: Armed resistance, non-recognition of the occupation in any form, all Palestine from the river to the sea, the holy places and Jerusalem and the right of return” – Sami Abu-Zuhri.

It isn’t just the Hamas who are evil. There’s a profound moral and spiritual sickness in the West, too.

Monessa Shapiro to The Herald

Gary Koekemoer attempts to be balanced in his op-ed – “No end to the death spiral.”  But in so doing he equates Hamas with Israel.

Hamas is a terrorist organization designated as such by Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, Israel, the UK and the USA.   It has as part of its charter the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews everywhere.   It has over the years committed numerous acts of dastardly terrorism against Jews and Israelis.  Among them: the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem in 2001 (15 killed), the Dolphinarium disco bombing in Tel Aviv in 2001 (21 killed) and the 2002 bombing of a Passover Seder at a Netanya hotel (30 killed).  In addition, it has fired thousands upon thousands of rockets into Israel all aimed at civilians with the intention of murdering as many men, women and children as possible.   It has dug underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel in order to kidnap and murder Israeli citizens.

Israel, under the then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, forcing every single Jew to leave, making the area Judenfrei for the Arabs living there.   But instead of building on the infrastructure, worth billions, left behind by the Jews, Hamas began firing rockets into Israel aimed at murdering Israelis.   In addition, there was a violent overthrow of the Palestinian Authority:  PLO members were thrown out of windows and Mahmoud Abbas was forced to flee to the West Bank.

Hamas’s hatred for Israel is so intense and its desire to see her destroyed so profound that it will even sacrifice its own citizens.  It has used cement and other building materials brought into Gaza to assist with the building of infrastructure, instead to build its tunnels into Israel.  Hence, too, its use of human shields in all confrontations with Israel, including in this last Great March of Return.  Koekemoer would like his readers to believe that women were encouraged to go the front because Hamas believed that the IDF would not shoot them.   On the contrary, in all confrontations,  Hamas has used women  and children as human fodder in order to augment its media victory.  Instead of telling women and children to heed Israel’s call not to go the fence because it would be dangerous, Hamas encouraged and even paid families to go. The more women and children killed, the more evil is Israel seen in the eyes of the media.   Hamas paid 3000$ to families who lost a family-member during the marches and between 300 and 500$ to those wounded.  On the Tuesday after the final day of the ‘March of Return” Hamas rebuffed trucks carrying medical supplies and food from Israel rather than accept these urgently needed provisions.

In his piece Koekemoer trivializes Hamas’s violent genocidal quest.  He mentions, in passing, the swastikas flown by the protestors.   Swastikas mean one thing – the death of Jews.  He sees the burning tires and fire-kites as innocuous.   He admits that Hamas’s purpose was to break down the fence, invade a sovereign country and kidnap or murder her citizens.  But because no Israeli died in this he glosses over it as though it is of no consequence.   He needed dead Israelis to be convinced of Hamas’s barbarous intentions.  By equating Hamas to the IDF he fails to recognize the one salient difference:  Hamas would murder any Jew simply because he was a Jew; in shooting at the protestors the IDF was protecting the borders of a sovereign country and the Israeli citizens living on the border from a barbarous enemy hell-bent on their extermination.