re: #10 Charles Johnson

Israel continues to get billions in loan guarantees from the US.

Israel continues to get aid from the US to develop and deploy more Iron Dome systems.

And yet Simon thinks that the US isn’t friends of Israel.

It boils down to an irrational hate of Obama and/or Kerry, and assuming that all US actions inure bad outcomes to the US or its allies. The FAA order was on the harsh side - stopping all US flights to TLV, but that also gave Israel a clear message and goal - do what it takes to stop the missile attacks. It was a goal that the Netenyahu government had not been clear about up to that point. Simply “mowing the lawn” as some commentators had called the repeating method of going in and degrading Hamas capabilities only to see them come back within a few months or years’ time isn’t enough, but Netenyahu isn’t going to push for a reoccupation of Gaza, and no one outside of the radical right in Israel is up for that either.

There was a reason that Sharon pushed for and got disengagement (the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza). It just wasn’t practical to continue holding Gaza with the demographics and the cost - both in monetary and in societal/cultural terms.

So, the outcome here has to be in terms of tangible objectives - eliminating X number of tunnels or eliminating rockets capable of hitting TLV or some other metric. Destroying the tunnels was Netenyahu’s stated goal, but the destruction of the missiles is the one that gives him wider latitude to maintain some force inside Gaza.