Friday, August 8, 2014

What Should Israel Do?

There's a huge moral difference between Hamas's four week rocket attacks on Israel + its planned terror tunnel  attacks, and Israel's response, and this difference should be blatantly obvious to anyone:
Hamas fired over 3000 rockets directly at civilian populations. Their aim was to slaughter families in their beds, children in their schools, and the sick in their hospitals. The fact that they did not succeed was entirely due to Israel's foresight in developing an effective anti missile defense - Iron Dome. There are several IDF bases near the Gaza strip, but they were not the targets of the rockets, nor the newly discovered tunnels, which all opened in purely civilian areas. Hamas wanted dead Israeli civilians - the more the better.

In contrast, Israel's response was aimed at Hamas - designed to take out fighters, leaders, weapons and infrastructure. Israel neither wanted nor was it helped by a single civilian death, in fact quite the reverse, the civilian deaths have been Hamas's only success in a campaign where they have utterly failed militarily. Hamas therefore places its weapons storage in schools, its HQ in a hospital, its rocket launchers next to UNRWA facilities and on top of apartment buildings - it wants Israel to fire back. Think about it ... it is OBVIOUS - its rockets are a failure, with 30% landing inside Gaza, the rest being taken out by Israeli technology, so why break yet another ceasefire and restart a futile war? Why waste ammunition and risk fighters? Again the answer is simple - they need Israel to fire back, they need death and destruction to manipulate world media, and through it international public opinion, into condemning Israel for the deaths of "innocent civilians".

So perhaps Israel should not fire back? This is not an option for Israel nor any sovereign nation. Thousands of rockets fired at your cities; 5,000,000  citizens in bomb shelters; 1,000,000 deeply traumatized kids, and of course eventually a rocket will land on a target full of people. If this were to happen, the government of Israel would not survive, so of course it has to fire back. It is the primary responsibility of a government, above all other things, to defend its citizens. That responsibility even outweighs the burden of trying to avoid civilian deaths in the enemy state. These are awful and sad , but the burden of protecting them lies with Hamas - a duty it has not only failed to fulfill, but has done the reverse by using them as human shields and leaving Israel no other choice but to fire back.

To those who say Israel's response is disproportionate - what does that mean? What should Israel do...nobody seems to say that? It honors ceasefires, pulls out its forces and comes under attack again - so please, we've heard the mantra of restraint for years - WHAT SHOULD ISRAEL DO ?

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