Two juxtaposed headlines today on CNN: 

Israel accepts new US proposal for ceasefire with Hamas, says Israeli official

Right, Israel is just buying time while it kills or exiles more Palestinians from Gaza. Any similar Russian agreement to ceasefire in Ukraine will go the same way.

This is followed by 

Israel approves biggest expansion of West Bank settlements in decades. 

This means that the Israeli invasion of the West Bank is not only continuing, but is being ramped up. (some 60,000 of the “settlers” are American citizens; the Americans provide the leadership for state-sponsored terror on the West Bank).

I think the current government  of Israel does not really want a ceasefire in Gaza at this time. Israel will not permit a ceasefire in Gaza until they have either taken it over or have made it like Hiroshima or both.

I also think that Israel was to a degree complicit in the vicious Hamas attack. They knew it was coming, took no steps to prevent it, and have used it as a respectable casus belli. So Israel is enlarging its borders, and expelling the unwelcome, in two ways: in the Westbank by infiltration and colonization, in Gaza by invasion.

So I anticipate that Israel will continue to raise objections to a ceasefire until it is satisfied that it owns Gaza.

Irredentism is the passion, usually exploited by demagogues, to get back what is thought to be a nation’s former property. Russia presents itself as the successor state to the Russian Empires, and cites this as the basis for seizing territories from Ukraine, their pretense of respectability for this aggression being that they are simply taking back what once was the property of the Russian Empires. And, unless Russia’s grab for Ukraine is wholly frustrated, this same irredentism will probably be used to justify Russian invasion of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Poland.

Israel is doing the same thing on the West Bank and in Gaza, claiming a kind of “manifest destiny” for violence on the West Bank by “settlers” who have come to claim what God gave to their distant ancestors and for the police-action destruction of Gaza and deportation of millions of Palestinians.

I cannot see much difference between Israel and Russia. It is time to stop buying into Israel’s endless victimhood and affectation of democratic values and to begin being as tough with Israel as we would be with any other aggressor nation.