If you defend Israel’s right to defend itself, and accurately point out that Hamas is committing war crimes on an ongoing basis, you’re a “right-wing activist,” but if you are a member of International A.N.S.W.E.R, cheering on the terrorists of Hamas, you’re merely a “protester.” As is pointed out, apparently 80% of Israelis are “right-wing activists.” News to many of them, I’m sure.
And here are some thoughts on Israel’s war objectives:
Israel will stop the operations not when the rockets stop, but rather when Israel thinks it has crippled Hamas and hindered its regenerative ability to the point where the next incredibly challenging step can be taken: Assist and empower Fatah enough in Gaza that it can once again raise a significant challenge to Hamas’s violent domination there. Fatah was decimated in Gaza by Hamas in ’06 and ’07. It must be rebuilt.
This would be consistent with the reports that Fatah is providing the IDF with targeting coordinates.
I’m beginning to wonder if the reason the Israeli-Palestinian war continues after so many decades with continuing loss of life is that the Israelis are fighting the war wrong in exactly the opposite way from what the lefties want: in other words, they are being TOO careful to avoid civilian casualties, and TOO respectful of the rights of their enemies, and TOO deferential to the religious sentiments of their opponents.
A country that aggresses against its neighbor, as the Palestinians are doing, needs to have enough bad things happen to it over a long enough time that the entire citizenry decides that the behaviors that led to the war were bad. We found this out in Iraq in the years following our “victory” after only a few weeks.
Maybe it would really be kinder in the long run to start bombing Palestine seriously, inflicting casualties among civilians, not sending warnings in advance, not offering humanitarian aid meanwhile, over a period of years until they decide to stop electing Hamas types and glorifying suicide bombers who keep the conflict going.
Mark has a point, but to the extent Israel depends on U.S. support I just don’t see it happening. The American people would never stand for an ally dishing out that much hurt.
And the fact the American people turned against the mission in Iraq based on “enough bad things happening” merely proves we as a nation no longer have the stomach for the kind of dishing-out it would take to get through to the Palestinians. The “enough bad things” we suffered in Iraq over the course of five years would look like a hangnail — and not even an infected one — to the Palestinians.
I don’t think there is any “getting through” to “the Palestinians”.
The Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank, and their refugee-camp confined cousins, have been tools of the established Arab states (and the Persian Empire) since 1948.
These “Palestinians” have been an abused, radicalized population pool with which to keep the Israeli’s busy — the established Arab states (and Egypt) got their asses kicked too many times by the Jews of Israel, and further ass-kickings would be too destabilizing to their regimes.
The Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza have also been raised in a totalitarian regime of “hate the Jew” from their youth.
In such circumstances, there is no reconciliation in our lifetimes.
The Arab regimes also don’t want to accept these Arabs of Palestine, because they would be destabilizing within their own states (Jordan, late 1960’s).
Unfortunately, the Arabs of Palestine are, in the Biblical sense of the word, “accursed” — though not by God, but by their “brother Arabs”.
There is one exception, of course…
The Arab citizens of Israel. Unless they get stupid and become a 5th column within their own state.
I should probably have added that 99.999% of the “enough bad things” Palestinians have had happen to them, have been self-inflicted, if not directly then certainly as a consequence of what they have done or permitted their “leaders” to do in their name.
Which is another way of saying I think MG is spot on.