Ziad Amra gave me his take the other night on the tragedy in Gaza. Amra is a Palestinian-American, a lifelong Minnesotan, a banker, and often serves as spokesman for the local chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It was in that capacity that I met him years ago and came to rely on him for a local pro-Palestinian take to balance my stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His view of the current crisis is a strong, bitter, mixture of sadness, frustration and anger. He directly disputed many of the main themes that have come through in mainstream U.S. media coverage of the fighting in Gaza. I will give it to you straight, without playing the he-said-she said game in this post, except for this warning that it is one person's view, and the view of a person who is on one side of a very complex debate.

But I will follow up to seek response/rebuttal from other sources in the days ahead.

Amra considers the Israeli invasion of Gaza to be "a war on the civilian population of Gaza and a war on the Palestinian people." He completely rejects the Israeli argument that the actions are a reasonable, measured response to the provocation of Hamas rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.

"The fact that one side shoots randomly at cities doesn’t give the other side the right to do the same thing, especially if the other side has high-tech weapons" capable of doing a lot more damage, Amra says.

When he hears the question raised, as it has often been raised in recent days: "How would Americans feel if someone in Canada was firing rockets across the border at U.S. cities?..." it makes him sick. And makes him want to say:

Would it make any difference if the entire population of Canada was under U.S. occupation? Would it make any difference if the United States was a country built on territory taken from Canada? Would it make any difference if the Canadians firing the rockets were refugees from their homeland, which was taken by the Americans? Would it make any difference if the United States held Canada in a state of siege that ensured widespread poverty, that left Canadians without reasonable access to food or medicine, that forced the majority of Canadians to rely on U.N. handouts, leading to malnutrition and permanent developmental deficiencies in many of their children?

Without those issues being raised, the analogy is completely out of context and seems designed to lead to a conclusioin that is predictable, simplistic and wrong, said Amra.

Are you saying that Hamas is justified in shooting rockets into Israel, I asked, aimed at Israeli cities, seeking to kill any Israeli man, woman or child they are lucky enough to hit?

Amra said he "isn't interested in justifying what either side is doing," (bit of a dodge there). "But what alternative did they [Hamas] have?"

He hears it said that instead of focusing on killing Israelis, Hamas should have focused on building a better life for the people of Gaza. But he believes that Israel has made this impossible by the conditions it imposes on Gaza -- conditions he portrays as a siege or an occupation from the outside. (Israel literally and directly occupied Gaza with its troops inside the territory from 1967 to 2005. Then Israel withdrew its troops and its settlements from the territory. But Amra's view is that the continuing level of Israeli control constituted a de facto continuation of the Israeli occupation.) The siege/occupation is itself an ongoing act of war by Israel against Gaza, so the cease-fire, that Hamas is blamed for breaking with its rockets, was never really a cease-fire because the siege was never lifted.

Israel claims that it wants a two-state solution with a democratic Palestinian state, Amra says. But when the Palestinians elected Hamas, this result was "disagreeable for Israel and for the United States." So the siege policy was ratcheted up to ensure that Hamas had no opportunity to make life better for the people of Gaza. The message to the population was: If you want any hope of a better life, rise up against Hamas.

Amra does not believe Israel is sincerely interested in a two-state solution. The world has long recognized the shape of the deal that is necessary to create a two-state solution, he says: withdrawal of Israel to the pre-1967 borders, removal of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, creation of an independent Palestinian state comprising the West Bank, Gaza and the Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a fair settlement of the problem of Palestinians who fled their homes in what is now Israeli territory during the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-49.

The Arab League offered this deal, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, to Israel in 2002, and then readopted the offer in 2007, at a better-attended conference, this time with the support of every Arab state. In Amra's view, this is a serious offer to Israel of recognition and peace with the entire Arab world. "It’s been on the table for eight years," said Amra. "My question is: What does Israel want? I can only come to the conclusion that Israel doesn’t want that."

Amra does not believe Israel is meeting its obligations to minimize harm to innocent civilians.

He sees evidence that Israel is targeting facilities where civilians are bound to be killed in large numbers, and have been. There are steps Israel could take to go after Hamas fighters with fewer civilian casualties, but it would require Israel to make less use of bombing and shelling, more use of soldiers on the ground. But that would put Israel's soldiers at greater risk. Israel is trading the lives of innocent Palestinian civilians -- a population that lives under Israeli control -- for greater safety of Israeli soldiers.

But even if Israel tried harder, the idea of minimizing civilian casualties makes little sense in the Gaza/Hamas situation, Amra says. It's not as if Hamas has an army or military bases. Hamas is a grass roots organization. Rooting Hamas out of Gaza "would be like sending an army into Manhattan to root out all the Democrats."

Why should Israel have neighborly relations with a terrorist organization that is pledged to the destruction of Israel?

Israel does not credibly claim that it recognizes the right of a Palestinian state to exist, Amra says. And Hamas' rejectionism is overstated, Amra says. Hamas has offered Israel a long-term truce, and Hamas has publicly said it will accept any agreement that the Palestinian Authority negotiates with Israel, as long as it is adopted in a referendum by the Palestinian people.

What about the terrorism piece?

What Israel and the West term terrorist tactics by Hamas can be viewed as acts of resistance to and defiance of occupation and oppression. Israel wants to end the resistance without ending the oppression. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for leading the African National Congress' resistence to apartheid, he was told he had to renounce terrorism. He replied that he would not do so as long as there was no other way to make his grievances heard, Amra said.

This piece is one-sided

It certainly is (this is me talking, of course, not Ziad Amra). And I will follow up with people who represent the other side.