As for Obama's policy, there are a short term and a long term goals. First and foremost, Obama should try to achieve a cease fire based on continued truce (that Hamas wasn't interested in). The second goal must include Hamas, Patah in serious peace talks with Israel with a realistic time table (not the stupidity coming out of the quartet).

Yesterday, on Fox's Hannity and Colmes, Iran war hawk John Bolton said that Israel's recent bombing campaign in Gaza is all the more reason for the United States to bomb Iran now. "So while our focus obviously is on Gaza right now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict," he said, adding that "we're looking at potentially a multi-front war here."

It strains credulity, however, that Israel would have carried out its actions without prior consultations not only with the Bush administration, but with the Obama camp as well. Rather than trying to push through its Gaza attack out of fear of a less sympathetic environment in Washington after Obama enters the White House, it is far more likely that the Israeli government was doing Obama a favor by carrying out a crime that he supported before he had to take public responsibility for it.

The reality is that the Democratic president-elect has sworn to maintain US support for Israel and has repeatedly defended Israel's "right to self-defense," including during its criminal war against Lebanon in 2006 and in regard to its repeated attacks on Gaza. He has likewise promised to maintain the US pledge of $30 billion in arms aid to Israel over the next decade.

Those he has chosen as his top aides--the congressman and former Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and his former presidential rival Hillary Clinton as secretary of state--are known for having criticized the Bush administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israeli aggression.

During the election campaign last summer, Obama made a trip to the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which had been a target of rocket attacks from Gaza, to provide an explicit justification for the kind of assault now being waged.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said during the visit. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." He uttered not a word of sympathy for the Palestinians and gave no indication of what actions he expected from parents in Gaza who have watched their children torn to pieces by US-supplied bombs and missiles.

Meanwhile, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi issued a statement providing an explicit endorsement of the Israeli bombing campaign. "When Israel is attacked," she said, "the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."

The response of Obama and the Democrats to the ongoing atrocity in Gaza represents a stark warning. Far from representing a last gasp of militarist aggression on the part of the lame duck Bush administration, the assault on Gaza is an indication of the shape of things to come.

The coming to office of the new Democratic administration will not spell an end to the crimes associated with US imperialism, but rather their continuation. Driven by the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, American militarism will play an ever more prominent role in Washington's desperate struggle against its rivals for the domination of dwindling markets and vital resources.

Hamas is to the Palestinian cause as the Republicans were to ours prior to our recent election. There can be no peace as long as they hold sway in Gaza.

Or, you could read a newspaper.  Let me help you.  Go to news-dot-google-dot-com and type in "rocket attacks.

• "Israel threatened to invade Gaza to stop rocket attacks on its settlements"

• "Israel moved closer to invading Gaza, saying Thursday it had wrapped up preparations for a broad offensive after Palestinian militants fired about 100 rockets and mortar shells across the border in two days."

• US urges Hamas to cease rocket attacks on Israel

• Rocket attacks plague Israeli towns

• Obama adviser aligns with White House in criticism of rocket attacks on Israel

• US urges Hamas to cease rocket attacks on Israel

while it is necessary to defend Hamas against the ongoing assassination of its leaders and the unending vilification of its supporters as "terrorists" by those inflicting massive state terror against a civilian population, this Islamist movement has no real perspective for confronting and defeating the US-Israeli offensive.

The firing of rockets into southern Israel was aimed at convincing Israel to negotiate a lifting of economic sanctions, just as its talk of renewed "martyr operations," sending young Palestinians to blow themselves up in Israeli cafes and buses, is similarly designed to pressure the Zionist regime.

No one has benefited more from the domination of nationalism and Islamism in the Arab countries than the Zionist regime itself. There is no nationalist way out of the present morass.

Creating another national mini-state in the region will not provide a solution to the decades-old dispossession of the Palestinians. The division of the West Bank and Gaza by Israeli settlements, security roads, checkpoints and walls make it clear that such a territory could represent only a Bantustan-type prison, with a Palestinian bourgeois nationalist regime serving as its guards.

Israeli officials have made it clear that they see the so-called "peace process" as a means of creating just such a monstrosity, dubbed the "two-state solution," in order to lay the political foundations for expelling Israel's own million-strong Arab population, a massive exercise in ethnic cleansing.

This maniacal perspective, like the attack on Gaza itself, is a manifestation of the political bankruptcy and crisis of Zionism. The Israeli state and all of its major parties are subordinate to a military camarilla. The regime staggers from one reckless military adventure to another--from Lebanon to Gaza and, on the horizon, to Iran--inflicting destruction on civilian populations while horrifying and demoralizing large sections of Israel's own people. ...

A genuine struggle against Zionism is conceivable only on the basis of a class struggle that transcends national boundaries, uniting Arab and Jewish workers based upon their common class interests. Outside of a class perspective, which seeks the independent and united mobilization of both Arab and Israeli workers, there is no real means of dealing a deathblow to Zionism and imperialism in the Middle East.