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AFAIK, we judge people according to where their bullets land, not by what they intended to hit.
In terms of terrorists attacking us (as I'm not aware of the last person to walk into a shopping mall and blow it up) they have evidently identified people working in economic centers to be waging economic warfare against their nations.
Your refusal to attribute rational reasoning to their motives and actions will perpetuate your inability to understand the root causes to their behavior.
If we are limiting our discussion to Isreal/Palestinian affairs we should examine each incident to decide whether people really are just walking along and blowing things up for no apparent reason. I suspect that they believe that targeting civilians will gain international attention and condemnation for the actions as well as spotlight the inappropriate responses.
What they can't control is the response so many have that legitimizes Isreali soldiers shooting into crowds, bulldozing innocent civilians' homes, and brutal policies towards Palestinian civilians in response to terrorist atrocities and somehow rationalizes the state-sponsored atrocities into a different moral plane as you seem to be doing here.
In regards to your second position--that inflicting civilian casualties is not a sound military objective--I only need point to historical battles to rebut such an assertion.
I've made the points I want to in this thread. I do agree with you that who is labeled a terrorist versus a legitimate soldier is a semantic debate--I'm pretty sure that was the original point both eple and I were making.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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