Just because the US (or unspecified European countries) would do a particular thing doesn’t automatically mean that it’s the right thing to do.
For example, many of us Americans protested the United States’ going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks. While we thought the terrorists who attacked us should be captured and punished, we didn’t think it was in the best interests either of justice or of our own safety to retaliate for the terrorists’ killing many innocent citizens by killing many more innocent citizens of other countries.
Admittedly, not a lot of people agreed with us at the time, but that doesn’t mean we were wrong. Nor would it make us hypocritical if we held that it’s not in the best interests of justice or of Israel’s safety for Israel to retaliate against terrorist rocket attacks by killing many innocent Palestinians.
I don’t disagree with the thrust of what you’ve written here, but out of curiosity, how would you say Israel should protect themselves from rockets being launched on them?
Of course not. I support Israel’s right to disrupt enemy attacks through offensive means - whether it be hitting Hamas rocket launchers or blowing up a stash of suicide explosive vests waiting to be used.
I’m just saying that with Iron Dome, Israel is no longer stuck in a situation where it’s only options are “hit or be hit.”
Incidentally, if laser weaponry advances enough, Israel might someday be able to just sit back and deplete Hamas of rockets by zapping them out of the sky, since such lasers (in theory) have an almost unlimited number of “shots.”
Israel could do a lot of things. All Hamas has to do to is stop trying to kill Israelis. Seems like a pathetically low bar to present themselves as being reasonable. But it is their goal to kill Israelis. Everything else is incidental to them. Including the lives of innocent Palestinians.
At the risk of making this into a taken-for-granted trope, do you not think that a gift of some 3000 working greenhouses might have helped the Palestinians? Given what they did with that gift, I’m not sure the Palestinians (and especially Hamas) are even interested in developing a viable economy - a successful economy might diffuse too much of the anger and with it the Palestinian need to ‘overcome’.
Whatever we may think of the rockets, they are largely an ineffective protest against the blockade and economic oppression of Gaza. Few, if any, Israelis have been killed by the rockets.
The Israeli strategy of maintaining the blockade has been equally ineffective in stopping the rockets. The Israeli strategy has, however, been very effective in killing Palestinians. So, it’s really not a matter of protecting Israel or preventing the killing of Israelis.
Israel has lost the last two encounters and is losing this one. It is not a matter of give and take or even negotiation. It’s time for Israel to lift the blockade and resolve the Palestinian issue.
What’s your point? Half of the green houses were pillaged by looters and criminal elements. The other half are in production. Similar things happen to abandoned properties in the US.
Had Israel turned the greenhouses over to Gaza business interests in an orderly manner there would have been little looting.
Can someone remind me who started this whole thing first?
I kid, of course. Please don’t do that. And please stop using the “but they started it” argument. We have rockets being fired randomly into Israel. Nothing done in the past justifies that.
Yeah, I admit, we did invent the concentration camp, import food out of a starving country, go around colonizing half the world…oh. Never mind.
(Seriously. This whole, "WE’RE more civilized than you shit is really fucking annoying)
I’m always truly amazed at how many Europeans seem to think that they are somehow seen as more civilized by the developed world than the US.
The US, the UK, and France have all done extremely horrible things to the Third World so from the point of view of much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia their response would be “that’s mighty white of you.”
Seriously, I can understand when the Danes or the Finns make such statements, but I always want to piss myself laughing when I hear it from citizens of former colonial Empires.
Is is true that the Hamas guys are purposefully stashing weapons in schools and hospitals so that when the Israelis bomb these places some innocents will be killed?