Every side in the Gaza crisis seems to have their opinion as to how the current conflict started and who is to blame.

It has recently begun to surface that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas did not end with the firing of rockets by Hamas in late December. Rather the ceasefire broke down in early November with the Israeli killings of Palestinians. The killings carried out by Israeli soldiers took place in the tunnels that were leading into Israel. It is unclear what service the tunnels primarily served. Whether it was to smuggle food and supplies into the sealed border of Gaza or to commit acts of violence against Israelis, it is unclear. There is evidence to support both sides. The Gaza Strip was at the time (and still remains) completely sealed off so it is reasonable to believe that the purpose of the tunnels was to carry in basic supplies. On the Israeli side it is also reasonable to believe that because of prior rocket attacks from Gaza into Israeli territory that the tunnels were meant to be used to smuggle in weapons and ingredients to build and launch rockets. The reality is most likely a mixture of both.

The November tunnel killings have received a limited amount of press in the United States.

The media has spent significant time in their coverage of the Gaza crisis placing the blame for the crisis on the Bush administration.

While this may be true to some extent, the Bush administration was greatly distracted with their “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afganistan; it would be unfair to say the Bush administration did not give attention to the Israeli/Palestinian peace process early in the administration, only to be repeatedly snubbed by the Israeli government.

While trying to build up support in the Arab world for their War on Terror, the Bush administration established what they titled a “road map” to peace that the Israelis decided to undermine at every turn. Israel did this with the support of many high ranking members in the US Congress and conservative media figures in the US.

Israel at times openly bad mouthed President Bush himself. An example took place in the lead up to the Iraq War. As President Bush reached out to Iran and Syria for help in his War on Terror, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compared Bush to Neville Chamberlain, the infamous appeaser of the Nazi’s in the WWII era.

The Bush Administration’s Secretaries of State were also dealt with quite ruthlessly time and time again over the course of the last seven years by the government in Tel Aviv. This was evidenced by then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to Israel in the spring of 2002, when Israel proxies took to the air in America to doom the diplomatic trip before Powell had even set foot in Israel. Powell later called the trip “ten of the most miserable days imaginable.” And this was the pre-United Nations speech Powell, one of the most highly respected men in the world. Later in the administration Condoleezza Rice had a similar experience after visiting Israel seven times in the course of eight months, when on her visit in March of 2007 Olmert dismissed Rice’s request to hold a press conference after their meeting. This was a highly symbolic act of dismissal of American diplomacy in general.

Having suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of Sharon and more recently Olmert, the Bush administration seems to have given up and chosen to simply recite the line, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” This is a 180 degree turn to their reaction to Israeli aggression earlier in the administration, when Israel responded to a Palestinian suicide bomber that killed thirty Israelis by launching into the West Bank. President Bush then demanded that Israel must, “begin withdrawal without delay.”

It is now easy to blame the Bush administration for the situation in the surrounding Israel, but this is one case where every effort he made was undercut in a bipartisan way in Congress by continuing to support and fund Israel. Bush did continue to make the formal requests for economic and military aid for Israel, but he did not have a political choice. And when Bush tied stipulations to the financial aid, Israel broke the stipulations again and again and receiving very little punishment. Not to do so would have been a furthering of his political suicide, and a turning of his back on his most diehard supporters; the fundamentalist Christian Right. Since Israel knows it will continue to get funding from the US Congress beyond the reach of a Presidential veto they have no incentive to listen to any diplomat from any U.S. Presidential administration. It will likely be the same case with the Obama administration, simply because support of Israeli violence seems to be one of the few things Republicans and Democrats can agree upon in the United States Congress. Funding for Israel regularly passes with over 90% approval in both the House and the Senate.

Since the U.S. military is rarely directly involved on the ground in Israel or the occupied territories, Presidential administrations have little more than the bully pulpit to sway events on the ground. The bully pulpit, when not meshing well with Israeli objectives, has been repeatedly scoffed by the Israeli government.

The Bush administration seems to have run into conflicting interests in the way different goals in their own agenda relate to Israel. For example the Bush Administration likes to see the arms industry flourish. And by giving Israel military aid with which to buy millions and millions worth of high tech armaments they stimulate the US arms industry. This desire for the success of the arms industry makes it difficult to use their funding of Israel as leverage in their relationship. In this way the military aid to Israel could be looked at as a money laundering scheme to put tax payer dollars in the pockets of military contractors.

So now that Israel has again reached the point of embarrassing the US with a display of overwhelming violence in Gaza, rather than stick his neck out again and demand a withdrawal, Bush is swallowing his tongue and saying Israel has a right to defend itself.

Deploying Bush administration diplomats in the waning days of the administration would be beyond laughable in the eyes of Israel.