re: #680 mfarmer1

Can you imagine the Allies in WWII dropping food and medicine to the German troops while at the same time preparing to immediately engage them in ground warfare?

Israel has put its own troops in more danger by essentially supplying their enemy immediately prior to a ground invasion. It’s insane.

The people of Gaza voted for their terrorist government, and well, they’re responsible for Hamas being in power and should be forced to deal with the consequences.

I fear this action will end up like southern Lebanon and only empower Hamas.

This is a different kind of war. Israel doesn’t have any worries about whether the Hamas Army will win and march to Beersheba. Hamas can only defend, and defending, can only string it out and run up the Israeli casualty list.

There are biblical rules of war: it is permitted to burn crops standing in the fields, [because hunger is a legitimate means of war]. It is not permitted to chop down olive groves, [because that’s wanton destruction that has no impact on the war proportional to the long term damage done].

The philosophy behind that example suggests that Israel should try to limit the damage while achieving the main ends:

(1) push Hamas out of its rocket artillery firing positions, so that Sderot is no longer with range of Qasams and Beersheba no longer within range of Grads.

(2) Weaken Hamas so as to make a political shift to a less radical Palestinian government more likely, or failing that, to make Hamas less effective in its rocket siege of Israel.

Limited war for limited ends implies limited means. World War II is hardly a model war. We’re not comfortable with some of the things we had to do [Hiroshima], and we’re rightly ashamed of some of the things we did, though it served no real military purpose [Dresden]. This war should be fought with a due regard for the lives of innocents, taking into account that our own very existence is not much at risk. Nor, in this particular fight, is Israel’s.