Has the world finally had enough Palestinian casualties?

It is now incumbent on the world outside the horror of Gaza to prevent the status quo ante from being reinstated once Israel determines that it has bombed enough tunnels....let alone actual people who have nothing to do with its military ambitions.

When Palestinina parents ask of their flayed, dismembered, burned, shrapnel riddled babies, toddlers or adolescents "are these the children of the resistance?"...and plead for "peace or you will make terrorists of all our children", you would have to be extremely callous or an idiot to dismiss them.

The toll in the Palestinina children from relentless targeted and obviously error filled assaults by Israel's IDF is beyond inhuman.

It not only calls into question the true aims of the incursion, but also the very ability of the IDF itself.

The entire package is a disgrace to humanity, even more so because it has taken this for the 'world' to again notice Palestinians.

Israel has actually been killing Palestinians largely unnoticed by the 'outside' all year round for years - 1400 children since 2000. Their parents, siblings, families know.

If considered at all they are deemed necessary casualties in Israel's pursuit of the Holy Grail  - it's unparalleled security requirements. The reason for all military and non- military actions.

Even when Palestinians were killed, locked up by the hundreds, had their homes demolished when three israeli teens were kidnapped, few bothered to factor in this 'security needs' collateral.

When just before the kidnappings two Palestinian teens were shot in cold blood by the IDF - captured on film and uploaded to YouTube - there was barely a murmur.

The revenge torture and execution of a Palestinian teen made headlines because of the context of the missing Israelis. This kid's cousin who was savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers - again captured on film- made the 'news' because he was an American citizen.

What is not told is that beatings  at the hands and rifle buts of the occupying forces are a daily hazard for Palestinian teens. It is part and parcel of the systematic oppression of a whole people which has the temerity to refuse to lie down and take it.

Gaza - the open air prison, the ghetto -  enters out living rooms when Israel decides to "mow the grass" - it's deeply sinister slang for incursions into the Strip.

Netanyahu had been angling for a 'reason' to mow the grass since Hamas and Fatah announced their unity government.

On the news of the  Israeli teens' abduction he was once again judge, jury and executioner of all Palestinians, regardless of evidence.

As the toll of Netanyahu's mowing mounts - now the dead and injured number in the many thousands  -  and Gaza is pulverised into a wasteland, as UN havens are bombed, UN personnel amongst the dead, as war crimes are being collated there is indication of a perceptible move away from the blinkered treatment of Palestinians.

This focus of world leaders, international media and concerned citizens prepared to hit the streets in support must continue. We can not revert to the status quo ante whenever it is that Israel decides it has decommissioned enough tunnels. If not the endless cycle of violence will continue with no peace for Israel and no peace for Palestine.

The Times cartoonist Peter Brooks put it this way: Hamas must stop mining under Israel; Israel must stop undermining itself.

Netanyahu was hardly guffawed at when he enlikened the Hamas rockets into Israel as akin to the Dresden bombings. Lord Prescott was met with outrage when he noted that you would think the Jews, as people who suffered appallingly at the hands of the Nazis would have a "unique sense of perspective and empathy with the victims of a ghetto".

Seems we have a way to go yet, but there are signs....

Self professed Zionist Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times said he cannot a accept the current perversion of Zionism that has seen "the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli Nationlism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River....that blockades Gaza with its 1.8m people locked in its prison and is then surprised by periodic eruptions of the inmates..."

The futility if the occupation and it's consequence - endless cycles of violence - is indisputable.

So many lives and so much time wasted when everyone knows that killing and maiming oppressed people becomes a recruitment poster for resistance.

It is way past time for the United States to reflect on how many of the billions it gives to poor, struggling Israel (not) are responsible for killing innocents in Gaza.

As in apartheid South Africa there is no military solution for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It must be political and those who have any leverage at all have to use it. That means an end to the mollycoddling of Israel. That would entail no more protection through US vetoes of UNSC calls for accountability or adhering to UN resolutions, no more tolerance of Israel's flouting of international rules in tems of its undeclared nuclear arsenal, no more tolerance of a 47year long illegal occupation along with its rapacious settlement construction, and at least a freeze and reinstatement for genuine behaviour of foreign aid.

It might hurt Israel's friends and allies, but sometimes friends and allies have to face the facts, even if that is to avoid being dragged down themselves.

Netanyahu and his dangerously right wing coalition need to be forced to recognized that their talk of the moral high ground is obscene.

The only high ground they can claim is that atop the mounting pile of predominantly innocent Palestinan corpses.