So, I Take It You Don’t Support the Gaza Offensive, Then?

Hey, at least it was only the General Assembly that declared Zionism “racism.”

And, if I was a Palestinian living in Gaza I think I could find similarities between the two.

Seeing how these are the people who elected Hamas, that’s not saying much.

The Israeli response is so absolutely disproportionate and escalatory…

I agree about the response being disproportionate — the Israelis should target only civilians.

Innocent people get killed in war, especially when you’re fighting an enemy that intentionally places its military facilities in crowded urban areas. Yes, war sucks, which is perhaps why Hamas shouldn’t have started one.

While Hamas has fired plenty of missiles, I saw it reported than none of them have ever killed an Israeli.

Just because the rockets have bad aim and half of them are duds doesn’t make it any less a casus belli.

So killing hundreds of Palestinians in response is absolutely disproportionate. The missiles are a kind of harassment, and in return Israel should harass the Palestinians – but killing hundreds? No, it’s a crime.

No. If an enemy nation is firing rockets into your cities, you neutralize the threat. If said enemy chooses to hide its rockets in the population that elected it to power, that’s unfortunate, but not the Israelis’ fault. Hamas chose to end the ceasefire. They chose to open up hostilities. Now that they’ve gotten what they wanted, they can choose to end it anytime they wish.

Well,you may be right, in that Hamas got what they wanted, and they will be the long run winner from the Israeli attacks. The losers, of course, are the Palestinian people.

Well, possibly. But then again, aren’t the Palestinian people getting what they wanted, too? It’s not like Hamas’ rejection of a two-state solution/views on the matter of Israel’s right to exist were kept hidden from them during the Palestinian elections. Yes, Fatah is corrupt as hell, but Hamas is simply bat-shit insane. And they voted for bat-shit insane. I can’t remember who it was — I think maybe Victor David Hanson — who pointed out when Hamas won and people were bitching about the irresponsibility of pressuring Arab regimes to democratize, one benefit of such wins is that it draws the battle lines a lot clearer. Before, you could argue that they shouldn’t suffer because of the actions of a dictator. But now? (Note: I’m not suggesting that means the Israelis should specifically target civilians).

Do you think that Israel’s current actions have or will ‘neutralize the threat’? Of course Hamas factions will always be able to smuggle in missiles and find somewhere to fire them off harmlessly into the Israeli countryside. And then reap the political rewards when Israel overreacts and kills plenty of innocent Palestinians, raising even more sympathy and financial contributions for Hamas from throughout the Middle East.

Well, possibly. But then again, look what pulling out of Gaza and Lebanon brought them. It all depends on how well the Israelis execute and what kind of political decisions Hamas makes.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that will not be satisfied until the state of Israel is destroyed. This group does not believe in an peaceful coexistence.

Well, yes. But so was the PLO. And Egypt and Jordan didn’t believe in peaceful coexistence, either. Maybe, one day, Hamas — or at least parts of it — will come to accept that Israel isn’t going anywhere. But they haven’t shown a willingness to do that — the most they are offering is an Islamic truce, or hudna, and that’s only if Israel retreats to its 1949 borders, including East Jerusalem, and recognizes the “right of return.” Hey, don’t take it from me:

http://www.latimes.com/news/op.....7954.story

Still, maybe one day Hamas will be ready to talk. Frankly, I don’t see why Israel would care if Hamas wants to bring back crucifixions and handing in Gaza — some might argue that having a strict Islamic government there that keeps a tight control on things is just what Israel needs to ensure its security — as long as they are willing to give up using Gaza as an advanced base for jihad and recognize Israel.

Despite their hi-tech surveillance and weaponry the IDF seems to have some trouble in stopping an empoverished, blockaded enemy from firing homemade missiles at their cities.

Well, it’s not that they’re having trouble stopping the launches, per se… It’s that they’re having trouble doing so without indiscriminately killing all the civilians they’re supposedly indiscriminately killing.

Reg #50: Well, Hamas certainly thinks so:

A furious Hamas attacked the Arab League stance as “pathetic”. Spokesman Fawzi Barhoum also accused Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, of ordering members of Fatah in Gaza to gather intelligence on the whereabouts of Hamas leaders to pass to Israel – a grave charge that underscores the deep rift between the factions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl.....hamas-gaza

Religion is one of the strongest opposition forces, and this was also proven in Eastern Europe. The Catholic church is credited with being a big undermining force of the communist regime in Poland, but we didn’t mind that one.

I think we didn’t mind so much because Church leaders in Poland weren’t calling for Poland’s legal system to be reorganized along Old Testament lines, heretics be crucified and Polish territory be used for the Jesuits to fire Katusha rockets indiscriminately into Minsk.

Hamas didn’t get elected because they want to kill Israel – they got elected because they did a better job than Fatah at improving the daily lives of people in Gaza when they were elected.

Well, yes, perhaps. Then again, the Germans elected the Nazis to improve the Depression-era economy, and even Mussolini made the trains run on time. That the Palestinians have for a choice of leadership an unappealing choice between corrupt, incompetent Fatah thugs and and an ethically clean, well-organized movement that builds schools and hospitals and, oh yeah, has as its stated goal the launching of jihad on your much more powerful neighbor and is designated a terrorist organization in much of the civilized world is unfortunate. As a Muslim friend of mine once put it, the problem in the Islamic world is that it tends to push its shit to the top. Still, as I said above, they had a choice between corrupt and crazy. And they chose crazy.

The first day of the air raids they dropped 100 tons of explosives on a single target. 100 tons. They HAD to expect to draw substantial civilian casualties from that, and to me it’s unacceptable from one of the most advanced military powers in the world.

Well, the US may actually be THE most advanced military powers in the world, and look at how much fun they’ve been having engaging in urban combat in Iraq. Still, look at the bright side — at least the Russians aren’t sieging Gaza.

So Hamas moves in urban areas. Therefore the solution is to blow up entire buildings and neighborhoods rather than do the work to figure out where the bad guys are? That’s the advanced playbook?

I don’t mean to sound snippy, but were you expecting a Tom Clancy novel? Gaza is a highly urban, very densely populated area. It’s where Hamas feel comfortable fighting, particularly because they know it will cause civilian casualties. It’s unfortunate that innocent people will die because of Hamas, but really, do you think anybody else’s military could fight this any cleaner? If so, how?

Plus comparing the Palestinians – a pretty beleaguered people who have never known prosperity or modern democratic institutions – to the pre-WWII Germans is pretty unfair.

Well, yes, if one if comparing national strength and democratic traditions. I was, however, comparing the decisions of the electorate, namely, that they voted for good social services. As Andrew McCarthy put it in NRO:

When we appraise hostile countries, it has become de rigueur in our foreign policy circles to distinguish the “people” (always good) from their nasty governments. So it is with the noble Palestinians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted in a 2006 interview, for instance, that the “great majority” of them — i.e., upwards of “70 percent” — are “perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace.”

This is preposterous. Palestinians are weaned on Jew-hatred through schools and media controlled by the competing factions and other jihadists. Their national heroes are those dedicated to killing Jews, most especially the “martyrs” (or shaheed) who self-implode in suicide attacks. It is to be expected, then, that when the public is polled in the actual Palestinian territories, rather than in Condi-world, a very different reality is reflected: About three in four Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist, a figure that soars to over nine in ten when only the fighting-age demographic (between 18 and 25) is considered.

It is, moreover, only natural that Palestinians would choose Hamas in a free election, as they did in 2006. Of course, no shortage of delusional gibberish has been spouted about this outcome by democracy devotees — who typically twaddle about elections having consequences right up until the moment when the election happens and they don’t like the consequences. So, to maintain the fiction that we are dealing with decent, peace-loving people, we are urged to blinker the Palestinians’ choice to be led by unabashed mass-murderers. That, we are told, merely indicates a desire for less corruption and better social services — metrics by which Hamas is putatively superior to Fatah. I somehow doubt we’d be so nuanced if a cognate electoral choice were made by our neighbors in Canada or Mexico.

http://article.nationalreview......038;w=MA==

Because the IDF says it’s so, doesn’t make it so. But I do admire the Washington Posts’s ability to turn a story of naked brutality into a morally ambiguous fairytale.

True. Then again, it doesn’t make it not so, either. Nor does the fact that the UN says it’s “99.9 percent certain there were no militants or military activity in its school” make it so, either.

Btw, explain this to me: Why were kids and a UN official hanging out with rocket-firing hamas militants?

I wouldn’t presume to know, being neither a Palestinian kid nor a UN official.

#85: What do I think? Really, I don’t know what to think. I’d like to think the kids were simply in the wrong place in the wrong time and the UN official really was giving the mortar guys target coordinates, but I’d also like to believe parents wouldn’t indoctrinate their children about the glories of martyrdom and the elected government of a political entity would pursue a strategy to actually maximize their own civilian casualties. Alas, what I’d like to believe and what is aren’t always the same thing.

Israel needs to finish the job and get Hamas out of Gaza. Only then will the Palestinian children in Gaza have a chance of growing up as normal people instead of being raised to be terrorists and suicide bombers.

Don’t think that will happen either. Regardless of who wins, the Palestinians lose. Look at it this way: if — IF — Hamas gets kicked out, they’re going to be replaced by Fatah (from the Israeli perspective, better than Hamas, but not by much), which was unpopular in Gaza before and will be extremely unpopular if they return as unelected Israeli stooges. This is the Holy Land — no solutions, and definitely no happy endings. Just managing the shit until one side gets tired/cynical.

I’d agree with you, Nappunsaram, IF what the IDF was doing was an occupation. But it’s not, and this is no raid — it’s an offensive into a hostile urbanized statelet firing rockets into Israel proper.

You’re a poopie-head

Seriously, though, about the November incident to which you linked, yes, I guess — if we don’t count random rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in the months prior to Nov 7, including seven rockets and 12 mortars in August alone — you can say Israel broke the ceasefire… by launching a raid on a tunnel being prepared to kidnap IDF personnel (to be fair, this is the IDF explanation), which led to the death of a single Hamas militant that led to Hamas firing 30 rockets into civilian areas of southern Israel (followed by an Israeli strike on the rocket launchers, killing five militants). And even then, Hamas wouldn’t declare the ceasefire dead. Sure, it kept launching rockets into Israel (Hamas’ idea of a “proportional response” to the November raid, I suppose), but rather than declaring the ceasefire dead — probably because, in the absence of major IDF action, they considered it alive, as did the Israelis — they were debating whether to extend it until it expired.