Ok, so NOW you're endorsing Nelson Mandela's tactics? The Nelson Mandela who turned to the armed struggle after the white minority dictatorship in South Africa made nonviolent, Gandhiian resistance impossible by shooting nonviolent in the back at Sharpeville, even though their having been shot in the back proved they were already obeying the directive to disperse and that the soldiers had no reason and no right to shoot at them?

And you would agree that the US should apologize to the Black majority of the new, democratic South Africa foe having alerted the white dictatorship to the hiding place of Nelson Mandela in 1962, thereby consignors the man to decades of unjust imprisonment? A man who for decades was slandered as a terrorist simply for trying to free the Black majority from apartheid?

And you would agree that the South African white dictatorship forever forfeited any right to demand nonviolence from the Black majority after using decades of violence against all forms of dissent, after the violent suppression of the youth uprising at Soweto, after the drawn-out police murder of Steven Biko- who was trying to revive the idea of nonviolent resistance- and after decades when our country's leaders disgraced themselves by arming the white dictatorship, often with Israeli collision?

And you would also agree, I presume, that the Israeli government wad indefensible wrong to arrest and for several years exile Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian who was trying to organize nonviolent resistance to the Occupation, and not allow him to return to the West Bank until it was too late for him to organize anything?

And would you finally agree that the IDF needs to stop continually harassing the prohibitive majority of ordinary Palestinians who are decent and peaceful, who have no connection to the armed factions? That if Israel condemns armed resistance, it needs to remember John F. Kennedy's maxim "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable"(a maxim which remains absolutely valid, even if he did too often ignore it in practice) and needs to agree that Palestinians have tge RIGHT to resist Israeli rule by peaceful means, without being beaten, arrested or killed by the IDF? That no one should be killed by the IDF in Gaza if they've obeyed the IDF and gone to the "safe zones' or are just approaching the emergency food supplies that have been dropped to keep them from starving? That Palestinian resistance is not about hatred of Jews (though there are some Palestinian antisemites, just as there are also an equal percentage of Israeli Jewish Palestinophobes), but hatred of living under undeserved oppression? That- since the Holocaust was solely the responsibility of the European "Christian Nationalists" who collided with Hitler to carry it out, abetted by the British and North American "Christian" countries who, between them, could have taken in everyone Hitler wanted to exterminate and thus prevented the
extermination entirely, but who refused to do so out of an obsession with keeping their countries "Christian" identities- it is completely inappropriate for the Israeli government to invoke that horrific Christian Nationalist event to justify what it does to the Palestinians- a group which were not responsible for that event, could not have prevented it (Hitler was never going to settle for anything short of extermination) and don't support anything remotely like the Holicaust today?

And again- if you're going to bring up Mandela- what he fought for was a single-state solution where all people live as equals under the law- and, although the IMF forced that state to pay the debts incurred by its oppressors-making it impossible for the state to invest enough in education, housing and Healthcare to make it a fully just society- that society he fought for was created and works fairly well for all- or at least far better than the US worked at a comparable era in our history, the 1820s, when slavery was still being spread to new states and the Indigenous Dispossession was just beginning; or, for that matter, the 1920s, when Jim Crow was at its height, when half of Mexico had been taken by force in an unprovoked invasion, when Indigenous peoples had been all but crushed and when police were using violence to stop union organizing- so if what Mandela fought for worked in South Africa, why couldn't it work in Israel/Palestine? Even if we're talking about a two-state model(there can't be peace without Palestinians getting a state and not being forced to play the role of the vanquished party) Why can't there be a presumption of equal humanity and decency on both sides? And since peace can't come of making anyone surrender in this war, why not just take demands for surrender out of the equation on this?

And, if nothing else, why can't you do the decent thing and apologize for personally insulting the author of this essay? She's not a "useful idiot". She just disagrees with your views. Your views are simply one set of ideas- they aren't the only one that could ever possibly be valid.