Rattling the Cage: The moral superiority of an F-16

[bemildred]

Ordinarily, we Israelis tell ourselves that we are morally superior to the Palestinians because they're terrorists and we're not, they deliberately target civilians and we don't. After this last war in Gaza, though, we can't really tell that to ourselves because it's not very convincing.

After all, Hamas only killed three civilians with rockets during the war, while we killed several hundred Gazan civilians with all sorts of hi-tech weapons. Hamas did very little property damage here, while we destroyed thousands upon thousands of Gazan homes and civic buildings. So the argument that the Palestinians fight civilians and we don't is a little too farfetched, a little too ridiculous, to convince ourselves of our moral superiority in Operation Cast Lead.

This time, we don't talk so much about terrorism, about how the Hamasniks made war against our civilians. Instead, we talk about human shields, about how the Hamasniks used Palestinian civilians for protection while they were fighting our soldiers. The point remains - they fight dirty and we fight clean.

As I've written, we're distorting the meaning of the term "human shields" for propaganda purposes. Palestinian civilians offered little or no protection to Hamas fighters during the war: The civilian death, injury and property damage toll in Gaza makes that pretty clear. During the war, we heard time and again from the army that the standing order was to "fire at the source of incoming fire"; since the source of incoming fire was usually within crowded civilian areas (Gaza being as small and crowded as it is), that's what our soldiers aimed at.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304687620&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

[ConcernedCanuk]

1. What Israel did to Gaza amounts to returning fire from a pea-shooter with a Gatling gun

.
.
.

I understand Israels irritation with the rockets,

but the response of massacring civilians and destroying their homes and infrastructure was just a WEE bit overboard.

Israel jumped the shark -

The world was already a bit leary of Israel's status in the ME, especially with their tie ins to the USA and the PNAC/BFEE gangs

Israel is sitting high on their hogs cuz they have 200 nukes with the help of the USA -

and the USA needs that toe-in over in the ME cuz they hog so much of the oil that the USA desperately wants/needs