"But He Started It!"

Having siblings it was a guarantee I would use the phrase "but s/he started it."

And what angers me about parents is they retort;

"I don't care who started it, I'll finish it."

This is injustice, albeit on a small level.

But that is the key, and as Dennis Prager mentioned, it does matter who starts it.

Thus, imagine my surprise when I found out the 72 hour cease fire between Israel and the Palestinians was broken by none other than....



the Palestinians.

And for all the complications between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and for all the speculation and the philosophies of why who does what, if there is something I've consistently seen it's that the Palestinians in something nearly 98% of the time start it. I remember once, and in intellectual honesty, the Israelis starting it and where I disagreed with them. But they are heavily outdone in "starting-it-manship" by the Palestinians.

In any case, it's stuff like this that erodes any pity I have for the Palestinians because it's nothing more than outright lying when engaging in a farcical truce only to break it less than a week later. Furthermore, as long as this childish behavior keeps up, they can expect to have a standard of living equal to a one-paltry-25th of the Israelis because nobody will trust them and therefore nobody will ever invest in them. I don't see a Palestinian ETF or indexed mutual fund out there. But I do see an Abu Dhabi/Arab regional one.

Which begets a serious question I tender to the readers out there, why haven't they realized this and what on God's green Earth compels them to keep themselves down like this? Fine, I can understand them blaming Israel and the West for all their woes, but inevitably the Palestinian people have just got to get sick of this and say, "You know what, screw this suicide bombing stuff, I'm going to school to become an engineer and play X-Box."