The Real News Network has the story In Wake of Murders, Israel Considers More Settlements and Strikes on Gaza.

I bet I can guess what you may be thinking when you listen to the following part of the video.

ABUNIMAH: Well, my question is: where does this all end? We have an out-of-control Israel, which, you know, is–the scope of debate, as Lia describes it accurately, is between steal more land or bomb more Palestinians. And the likelihood is that they will end up doing both. And there seems to be no internal breaks that can change the disastrous course Israel is headed on. And there is also no international peace process. I mean, the peace process that collapsed was a sham anyway and served as a cover for ongoing Israeli colonization.

So the question is: what can change the direction? Even if calm or relative calm returns to Jerusalem or the West Bank in the next few days, it will only be temporary before the next disastrous event. And who knows where this will lead? So really something has to change. And all that I see on the horizon now that really gives hope is the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to raise the price for these Israeli policies of collective punishment, of land confiscation, to make it–you know, I mean, Palestinians are killed without consequence. They can be killed. Nobody says, find the perpetrators. I mean, just this year, six, now seven Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli soldiers. It’s suspected that the seventh was killed by settlers, and nobody is asking internationally, nobody is–you know, Obama is not demanding that the killers be brought to justice.

So, you know, I think it’s very important that people understand that waiting will not produce peace. We need to intervene in the form of boycott, divestment, and sanctions to change the direction and to end this cycle of horror and tragedy.

As I started hearing this, I was thinking, “Well, you know, the Palestinians had to know what the Israeli reaction would be to what they did. So who is going to stop first?”

Then I came to my senses. “The Palestinians” did not do “this”, some individuals who may have been Palestinian did “this”. There are criminals all over the USA that commit kidnapping and murder. Our police used to take the attitude (and sometimes still do) that the Israeli forces do. In our case, they would go into a minority neighborhood, assuming their was the slightest hint that a minority criminal had done the deed, and massively search and arrest people. Now there are many forward thinking police departments that know that you cannot behave this way and expect to get future cooperation from the people in communities that you treat this way. Police efforts to apprehend criminals are fostered by getting the cooperation of the communities in which the criminal might live.

Yes, the Israeli/Palestinian situation has deteriorated to such a point that many people looking in on Israel don’t see how “civilized” standards can be used by Israel in these situations. As in our civil rights struggles in the USA and in those of South Africa, a way was eventually found to turn around an impossible situation. If you don’t even think you ought to be looking for such a way to turn things around, you aren’t ever going to find it.

How deeply is a society willing to descend into depravity, before it realizes what it has become? When will that society decide that what they have become is not what they want to be? Yes, you can apply this to both sides of the fight. If you think it is right to let the side you favor to go on until the other side takes the first step, then you are not helping. Even to start on a trip together, someone had to have taken the first step to get the idea of the trip moving forward.