I don’t think it’s that simple.
I think the Palestinians must pull out a knife because they believe Israel has no right to exist.
The Israelis must pull out a knife because they must have a safe place to go when people want to put them into ovens.
Funny… and here I thought that sponsoring and harboring terrorists who atttack a sovereign country and deliberately target their civilians was preciptating a war. But I guess since it’s Israel that’s being targeted, it’s okay?
Honestly, can you name a single other nation on earth that would not see that as a clear casus belli?
Funny, then, that the one who pulled the knife is just fine in your book, and the one responding to getting stabbed is out of line.
I can name a great many nations who shouldn’t, and my own tops the list. I mean, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan seemed like a good idea at the time, even to me; but considering the way it worked out . . .
You’re turning it around, and not justifiably. Syria hasn’t pulled a knife on Israel yet. (At least, not for many years now.)
Those are two seperate issues; the right of nations to respond to attacks directed at them, and the wisdom of certain plans of retaliation. Afganistan, for instance, could have turned out much better if we’d stayed there in force instead of playing cowboy in Iraq.
No. You are ‘turning it around’ in order to make a rhetorical point, and that is not justified. You are saying that the nation which Syria has been attacking via a proxy force is, in fact, the aggressor if they defend themselves.
Perhaps it’s a reminder to Mr. Assad that he doesn’t need to go out drinking anymore. He can stay at home and get bombed.
It’s called counting coup; the ability to walk up to an enemy in the midst of a battle and lay a hand on him not to do harm but to show him that you could if you wanted to. Assad was home when the jets buzzed him. I imagine since then he’s changed his shorts and decided to seek residence elsewhere.
No matter what provocation has gone before, if the Israelis were to drop actual bombs on the president’s palace, they would not be defending themselves, they would be striking the first blow, initiating the first actual military action, and the world would justly view Israel as the aggressor in that instance. That’s how it works, and you know it. Aggression is sometimes justified (e.g., U.S. vs. Taliban Afghanistan), but aggression it remains.
Was attacking the tank and kidnapping the guy a military action?
Irrelevant – they are actions in which the Palestinian government (and even more so, the Syrian government) can plausibly deny complicity.
Was it ordered by and carried out by the military of the state?
Would you expect the UK to bomb the leaders of Ireland when the IRA were attacking them*? The UK didn’t attack. They did however keep punishing the general nationalist NI population during ‘the troubles’. The madness only stopped when they stopped fighting the fuckers and started talking to them, making some very hard and brave decisions along the way.
The ME is different than Ireland in many ways but punishing the general population by taking away vital infrastructure is just going to help the hardliners and make the moderates job harder. Go after the actual people if they must but this current bullshit is about making a political statement in Israel by new the new leadership who had question marks over their heads about how hard they’d be militarily.
*Some Irish politicians from the 60/70’s were IRA gunmen back in the day. e.g Sean Lemass who was a prime minister of Ireland was a gunman for Michael Collins during the War of Independence.
The difference, though, is, Sinn Fein didn’t control the government of Ireland at the time. While the Irish government in the 60s and 70s might have contained people who were in terrorist groups in the past, the Palestinian government contains people who are in terrorist groups now…the same group that kidnapped the soldier.
yojimbo, wouldn’t the situation have been a bit different if the Irish Defense Force was planting those bombs, not the IRA? Or the Irish goverment were training, equipping, and hiding IRA members?
In real life the Irish government didn’t cooperate with the IRA, didn’t support the IRA, didn’t sympathize with the IRA. Slight difference, right? If those IRA bombers had been part of the Irish Defense Force, don’t you think the British might have responded against Ireland directly? Wouldn’t that have been an act of war against Britain?
Stick “Charles Haughey gun running” into Google. To say that some in the Irish Government weren’t at least sympathetic at least up to the 80’s is naive to say the least.
Anyway this is a silly hijack and I apologise to the OP.
The actions apart from the direct ones against Hamas are seriously wrong IMO and detrimental to the peace process or whatever is left of it.
Complicity, maybe. But what about responsibility? That’s what really counts.
There are many possible definitions of “responsibility,” but I very much doubt anybody in the Syrian or the Palestinian government wanted the shelling or the kidnapping to happen. Perhaps they were insufficiently vigorous in preventing it.
It says “I can get to you, and I can kill you if necessary.”
It also says to the Syrians that their air defense systems are a joke and that if it comes to open war they’re gonna get their clock cleaned…again.
And tells them, you know, maybe we should back off on support for Hamas for a bit. Seriously, I can’t see anything wrong or stupid in buzzing the Presidents palace. Its sends a rather strong message that perhaps they should put their hands back in their pockets and back the fuck off supporting Hamas for a bit (or forever)…otherwise next time someone might get hurt, and that someone might just be the president.
It would make ME think twice before dicking with Israel anyway…YMMV BG. 
Anyway, as this was just a warning shot across the bows and really isn’t relevant to the OP (was just a way to backhandedly paint Israel’s actions as a farce and show them as a drunk in a bar, ect ect), I’ll leave it at that. I still haven’t seen any reason for the outrage over what is happening in Gaza…nor why Israel should have just sat there an meekly taken it without doing anything. So…back to the OP, ehe?
-XT
Good Lord, DSeid, I… I agree with you. All Israel is doing is showing how easily it can be provoked into spending blood, sweat, tears, and countless shekels. What we’re seeing here is a basic truth of asymmetric warfare (i.e., highly unequal reactions from each side to the loss of a single combattant), and Israel is creating an exploitable opportunity for Hamas. Posters here are acting like Israel should reoccupy Gaza to teach Hamas a lesson – when we know that there’s a faction of Hamas that would like nothing better. And a largish faction in Israel saying, “But we just got out! Now we’re going back in?”
The fact remains that Israel has yet – after nearly 40 years – to decide what it wants to do with the Occupied Territories. Pulling out of Gaza got rid of an immediate point of friction, but it didn’t address the underlying problem, and didn’t confer anything like sovereignty on the Palestinians. So what’s Israel hoping for at this point? That the Palestinians will suddenly decide they love them after all? Israel has to come up with a plan to address the problem in its totality – either separation and true sovereignty for some geographically reasonable Palestine, or integration of the Territories with Israel. We’re crazy if we think the Palestinians will be satistfied with any half masures. And until Israel proposes a real and respectful solution, the tit-for-tat violence will go on and on and on, and we’ll go on and on and on arguing about who started it.
But did they have a responsibility to prevent it?
Was Serbia responsible for preventing the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Arguably, but that did not warrant or justify Austria-Hungary’s response.