Israel’s response to Hamas
I read the following in today’s Huffington Post, by Lorelei Kelly:
“Killing lots of people on the other side is not only ineffective, it is counterproductive. It hurts your cause. It gets more of your own people killed in the long run. Like Israel — whose overwhelmingly violent response to Hamas rocket attacks seems to lack the most basic strategic or political meaning — and where language such as “self-defense” — words from the disconnected and bygone era of nation states — seems quaint and almost entirely inaccurate. “Defense” doesn’t mean the same thing when one antagonist is a state and the other a networked organization. It’s like the US Army fighting the Salvation Army. It’s like Bin Laden versus the USA. The same sets of policies and tools don’t work anymore. They make things worse. So political leaders (including our own) need to stop framing this deadly mayhem as some sort of justified or normal behavior. If we don’t start with our best friend, when will we ever understand how the nature of danger has changed for good.”
My first reaction is that she is right. But then, as Barack Obama has said, how else does one respond to someone who is lofting deadly missile strikes into your backyard? Other than by massive retaliation. In any case she doesn’t help her position by the comparisons she employs, especially the one comparing Israel vs. Hamas to the US Army vs. the Salvation Army. An army of suicide bombers, that Hamas is promising to relaunch, is an army, and there’s no easy way to defeat it.
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