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Originally Posted by loquitur
Will: I think Israel acts incredibly stupidly at times. Its governmental system is a travesty and many of its politicians are repellent. That has precisely zero to do with whether Israel has the right to shut down self-proclaimed genocidal murderers who hide behind children and seek to exterminate Israel's population. It does.
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You think Israel making serious mistakes doesn't have any bearing on a conversation about peace between Israel and Palestine?
Quote:
Originally Posted by loquitur
When you ask whether I'm ignoring the half of the equation about whether the bombs Israel is using are too big for the objectives, what's your point? I'm not a military expert and neither are you - neither of us has even a tiny clue what is or is not a weapon big enough to effectively achieve a military goal. You're just assuming that if there is collateral damage that means the bomb was too big, which is self-evidently false. What I do know is that there have been instances in the past where Israel used smaller bombs for the precise purpose of avoiding civilian casualties, and the result was that the bad guys (the leadership of Hamas, as it happens) got away. I can try to dig up a link for that if you want; it's pretty well documented.
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You don't need to be a military expert to understand that each attack being a response to a previous attack is an unending cycle. You don't need to be a military expert to know that Israel has one of the most high tech militaries on the planet, mostly due to backing by the US. You certainly don't need to be a military expert to know that killing dozens of innocent people in a refugee camp to kill one man is going to earn you animosity. I've seen a missile hit one building and level just that building doing essentially no damage to any of the buildings around it. That missile was launched by Israel into Palestine. That tells me that they can reduce collateral damage, but choose not to. If the target got away, that's because the intelligence was bad, not because the attack didn't blow up enough buildings.
That particular case was just a recent example, though. The best example in recent years was the invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers with the intent of trading them for Hezbollah prisoners. A symmetrical response might be to hit a Hezbollah training camp, which Israel has been known to do. Israel launched a rescue attempt which failed. What did they do next? They essentially declared war on Lebanon. There were massive air strikes on civilian targets, intentionally crippling the infrastructure of the country, a ground invasion, and a naval blockade. Over two soldiers. In response, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel. Fatalities? Over a thousand Lebanese civilians. 44 Israeli civilians that were only fired upon after Israels air strikes and invasion. Hezbollah was wrong to kidnap the soldiers, Israel was wrong to murder over a thousand civilians and send an entire country back into the stone age. The worst part is that Israel galvanized Hezbollah support, which was dwindling before the 2006 war. Now? Hezbollah is gaining positions in government again and Lebanon is becoming more radical, which is opposite to the path they were on 3 years ago.
The insane thing is that Israel were to give up Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah would no longer have a cause.
Do you have any opinions about the settlements in the West Bank? Bulldozing Palestinian homes? How are these acts of self-defense? How are these not essentially goading Palestinians to respond?