The NY Times explains how this photo made one girl a symbol of the Palestinian struggle. The Americans are always eager for symbols, but I see this in the context of a recent Financial Times article titled the issue is not whether Hamas recognizes Israel (reproduced on the Council on Foreign Relations). To quote:
Why should Israel care whether Hamas grants it the right to exist…Israel exists and Hamas’s recognition or non-recognition neither adds to nor detracts from that irrefutable fact. But 40 years after the 1967 war, a Palestinian state does not exist. The politically consequential question, therefore, is whether Israel recognises a Palestinian right to statehood, not the reverse.
There is very little left to say. Only to wonder if it were not for the ‘holocaust’, and the 3-4 million jews killed, if the west, particularly the USA, would still be purging its guilty concience with Palestinian blood?
[...] This blog post is a good example of the arguments used to defend and further Israeli interests. It sidesteps the core issue - is US policy furthering US interests - while repeating ad-nauseum Israel’s ‘democracy’ (which treats Arabs as 2nd class citizens), threats to its existence (which ignore that it is Palestinian existence that is actually under threat as I pointed out before), and as a last resort says Israel is threatened by genocide (nothing of Israel’s own record). [...]