Is Gaza Another Crusade?

The killing of 4 aid workers and 3 bodyguards by bombs fired from Israeli jets has made the whole mess in Gaza even more of a mess, if an attempt to root out a terrorist organization which has now resulted in more than 32,000 civilian deaths and 75,000 injured could be even more of a mess.

I didn’t think that any international political situation could get the fighting in Ukraine off the front page, but Gaza seems to have turned that trick in the past couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has just passed the one-year mark and somewhere around 10,000 civilians in Ukraine have lost their lives and another roughly 20,000 have been injured, numbers which only go to underscore how brutal the IDF incursion into Gaza has been.

I’m calling the movement of Israeli armed forces into Gaza an ‘incursion’ rather than an ‘invasion’ because Gaza happens to be part of Israel, even though the whole issue of how and why Gaza became a somewhat autonomous territory containing several million human residents has never been accepted or even acknowledged by either Arabs or Jews.

What Gaza really represents, as far as I’m concerned, is yet another chapter in a conflict which has been going on now for slightly less than fourteen hundred years, which is when a Muslim army was defeated in 732 by an army led by the French King…