I’d agree that the rocket attacks on Israel make no military sense whatsoever, except as a deliberate provocation. They have made the attacks so blatant that they must know Israel can’t help but respond militarily. In fact, that appears to be the entire purpose of the attacks. So blaming Israel for the invasion seems silly, in that it seems Hamas has desired just such an invasion. The civilians who die as a result certainly don’t deserve this even if they voted for Hamas, but it does suggest that they shouldn’t support Hamas now or in the future, if they want to avoid Israeli invasions. Of course, if civilians do support these provocations against Israel, I’m not sure how we can refrain from blaming them for the deaths of themselves and their children that result.

I’d agree that trivial threats should not be taken seriously, but hundreds of rockets filled with explosives shooting into one’s country is not one of those. I’m not sure how trivial you would think such threats were if they were landing in your vicinity.

Hamas of course do not really have any real army to deploy or military bases to operate from. They are poor and ill equipped and can only resort to terror tactics.

On the other hand, Hamas’ lack of resources makes their rocket attacks more confounding. These attacks kill about one Israeli civilian per 30-40 rockets fired. As terror tactics go, this does not seem to be working at all. The rockets are WWII technology at best, and still are costly to produce. So why do they persist?

Increased security in Israel has made it harder to carry out suicide bombings, and more importantly, the man on the street in the arab world no longer support such attacks.So Hamas must instead provoke an Israeli reaction, complete with civilian casualties, to gather support.

Unlike the suicide bomber, the Quassam rocket comes with a return address. The use of a rocket weapon also make these random terror attacks look more like a military problem. For the military men who work in all layers of Israeli government, solving this problem is hard to resist.

And here we are. The population of Gaza will suffer again. And no, they do not “deserve it” for having elected Hamas, any more than Israeli civilians deserve rocket attacks for their govenment’s mistreatment of Palestinians. Hamas has brought war upon innocent people to make themselves look heroic. And Israel is helping them to it.

I would consider anyone lobbing hundreds of rockets into my tiny country a threat, especially if they vowed to destroy my country entirely. That they cannot by themselves destroy Israel’s very existence does not make them an unserious threat, especially since their armaments are supplied to them by Arabs and Iranians with large armies of their own.

The attacks of 9/11 did not threaten the existence of the US, but they were still considered by most people to represent a serious threat. Or do you think the only threats worth considering seriously are those of total annihilation?

If we’re talking a war of words, Arab words against Israel are as cutting as they come. But you know, sticks and stones.

Maybe saying you supported everything Russia did is an overstatement. I’m not even disagreeing with you on your assessment of that situation. I pretty much found what you had to say quite valid. But I do recall that you spent most of your time not in condemning Russia’s “overreaction”, but in condemning those who thought Russia’s overreaction was the problem, when the real problem was Georgia’s provocation.

Similarly, in this case one can easily accuse Israel of overreacting to Hama’s provocation, but I wonder why you seem to be spending most of your time condemning Israel, rather than Hamas. Especiallly in that while Russia is not facing a serious threat from Georgian vows to destroy it, but Israel is indeed facing a serious threat from Palestinian and other Muslim countries’ desire to destroy Israel. The worldwide reaction to Israel’s actions here seem as out of line to me as the reactions to Russia’s invasion of Georgia did over the summer.

I don’t support Israel’s disproportionate reaction any more than I supported Russia’s. I think both took things too far, and used the provocation as an excuse to take care of a little bit of business that had been bothering them for a while. But in both cases the moral fault lies in those who cynically provoked a war in the first place in the hope that it would end up advantaging them by bringing in world condemnation and outside support, and I think that’s what ought to be condemned, rather than excused by putting all the blame on the side of the stronger military power. And I may be wrong in the causalty figures, but I had last read that the Russians killed something like 1,000-1,500 Georgians during their war, whereas thus far Israel has killed less than 500 Palestinians. If you have access to more reliable numbers I’d appreciate hearing about it.

Well, no, I don’t think it did, but I did not in any way support Russian operations outside of South Ossetia, and I certainly never attempted to justify the expulsions of Georgian villagers from Ossetia. I called Russian actions outside Ossetia unnecessary, foolish and disproportionate, among other things, and I said that the Russians shouldn’t be doing them. You can check my August archives if you don’t believe me. Indeed, at one point I compared the Russian attacks on Gori, Poti and other locations in Georgia to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and deemed them excessive.

My “support” for the Russian operation inside “Georgia proper” was much like my being an “apologist for Putin”–non-existent. The Russians did have some right to retaliate for the attack on Tskhinvali, where some of their troops were killed in the initial attacks, and they were technically within their legal rights as the internationally mandated peacekeeping force to repel the Georgian assault. Yes, I know that they were abusing that role, using the enclaves as proxies and using the proxies to project their power, but their military presence in the enclaves had some limited legality. When they went beyond that, I did not offer any words of support for what they were doing and said that it was unwise and wrong for them to do as they did. What I did do was to hold Saakashvili responsible for escalating the conflict. Incidentally, the person playing Saakashvili’s role in the current conflict is not Haniyeh, but Olmert. The difference is that there is no larger power that is going to intervene against Olmert and widen the conflict beyond the enclave.

Look, you can live in a fantasy world where in a completely asymmetric conflict, involving one of the most densely populated areas of the world, the actor with no sophisticated arms, no air defense, no modern military hardware, no military bases, etc., sets up camp out where its nemesis, one of the world’s leading military powers armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated military weaponry money can buy can – and will – bomb it into oblivion. Or you can accept that we’re in the real world, and that any force of any sort that wishes to stand up to that first world military force is going to try to hide its weapons and members in places where they won’t be picked off in what amounts to a turkey shoot. Make whatever judgment you want of that group, but you’ll find that this is always the case – and if you know your history, you know that it was the case when the future leaders of Israel were resisting the British Mandate, and how anti-Nazi resistant movements operated during WWII. Do you have anything to say about that, other than “That’s different”?

What you are saying is that, given Hamas’ woeful military capabilities, their decision to commit war crimes and use their own civilians as human shields is completely justified. Likewise, you are saying that turning their own civilian police force into an arm of their military is also justified.

Is this really rational or just? Isn’t the rational and just response, when at such an utter military disadvantage, to pursue one’s ends by other means? But instead, Hamas continues to pursue a military strategy of deliberate civilian martyrdom by provocation. Their “military” has no hope whatsoever of actually destroying the State of Israel. So why pursue military means at all? It is a crime against their own humanity to do so. Why not pursue a peaceful solution that takes advantage of Israel’s notion of social justice to achieve a better life for its people, and a peaceful co-existence with its far more powerful neighbor? It’s not as if Israel is dedicated to the destruction of any Palestinian State in Gaza, but only to one that is devoted to the destruction of Israel.
ny sense to compare this situation with Kosovo or Bosnia.

Even Egypt and the West Bank Palestinian government recognizes that Hamas is nuts. One hopes the people of Gaza will come to a similar conclusion from this debacle.

I also find it odd that Daniel would support Russia’s action against Georgia’s provocations, while condemning Israel’s response to Hamas. Didn’t the Russian response kill more Georgians than Israel’s response has killed Palestinians?

Looked at another way, of course, if the minimal operation Yugoslavia was carrying out in Kosovo actually merited a two and half month air war by NATO, Israel’s much larger operation ought to merit an even stronger reaction, but then I don’t think the war in Kosovo had any justification. It’s remarkable how so many of the backers of the current campaign favored that war–just imagine how they would complain if someone suggested that a campaign to strike against terrorists should be dubbed “genocide.” Perhaps they might then rethink their previous support for bombing the Serbs.

I often wonder, just who or what is being supported? Does supporting your country mean supporting the actions current leadership might take without regard to the rightness or wrongness of those actions? I don’t think it does. Clearly, I hold a minority position in that regard.

Flexible ethics is probably a pre-requisite for hard liner-ism. Maybe more accurately it could be described as a lack of any ethics at all. That is, whatever whoever is in power says is good, IS good. That seems like toadyism to me.

So there we have it – hard liner = toady.

Then again, thinking for yourself has never been a common trait among human beings.