where I went after Friedman not for this debacle but for his stance on the Iraq War. No one responded. Which is fine. But personal objection, on this thread, started OUT with Friedman's stance on Iraq.

That said, I think many of them think that it's possible simply to kill all or most of the Hamas militants, which means there won't be anyone left who can or will shoot rockets at Israel because they'll all be dead.

-- GlennGreenwald

I searched around for awhile trying to find the Dershowitz conversation on BBC. I didn't find it, but I did find him saying that nearly all of the civilians being killed in Gaza are Hama terrorists. He specifically said that women and children, even pregnant women, are suicide bombers or terrorists of some sort or another.

Israel has killed "hardly any civilians"--Dershowitz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkhysZrpYyQ

It's fairly clear that al Qaeda did 9/11 in a highly successful attempt to get the US to respond by doing something militarily stupid, and not to terrorize the US into submission.

In the event, they managed to get the US to do two something stupids, to invade and occupy two Islamic countries. The idea behind getting us to occupy Islamic countries is two-fold. We will eventually be defeated mlitarily, and, more importantly to their aims, the defeat will come at the hands of the people of an Islamic world radicalized to agreement with al Qaeda's way through the oppression of US occupation. Unless we get un-stupid quickly and withdraw from both countries, this strategy will undoubtedly work.

9/11, then, differs from the "counter-value" (to use Herman Kahn's terminology) strategy that Israel is using, in that it might actually work, that its operation quickly moves from killing civilians to engagement with our military. There is still the queston of whether the means of killing civilians justifies the ends of winning either sides' wars, but at least al Qaeda gets to that point of moral discrimination, whereas Israel is simply engaged in the irredeemably evil project of killing civilians pointlessly, with no prospect that this will help it achieve an otherwise valid purpose. The only prospect that what Israel is doing will end its conflict with the Palestinians lies in the extension of killing civilians beyond this unworkable terrorism aim it now has, into genocidal means pursued for genocidal ends. Killing Palestinian civilians will anger them, not terrorize them into submission, but getting Israelis used to killing Palestinian civilians could be the first step of a plan that would work to leave Israel in undisturbed possession of the land -- killing all the Palestinians.

Hello Mr Greenwald, thanks for keeping attention on Gaza, which remains in contention for the most blatant war crime of last several years by any western power.

In your posting you mention a quote from former Israeli defence minister Moshe Yalom:

“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

It seems that he did not say use exactly these words, though from his quotes it was apparent he saw the extensive Israeli use of violence to influence opinion/behaviour and the slightly paltry Palestinian one as morally different quantities (one being terror, the other deterrence - guess which!).

Just to alert you before the wingnut counter assault arrives, the always loathsome Commentary had an article on this particular point very recently so the drones may already be enraged.

Not to justify any violence. I believe violence is inevitable in the face of tyranny. Individually, each man's only sensible moral decision is non-violence.

But, didn't the World Trade Centers house CIA offices, multiple military recruiting offices and other firms that could be viewed as part of an agenda to harass the Muslim peoples? This makes WTC a far more legitimate target than Christian condo towers, farms and water purification plants in Northern Lebanon. Than the USS Liberty, Aspirin factories, than UN schools, ambulances and the like.

I wonder if the 9/11 attacks had hit the White House, Congress and K-Street if we Americans too couldn't have shared in the schadenfreude with the rest of the world.

The only explanation for Israel's behavior toward Palestinians is exactly as stated by qixote7 and casual_observer: a systematic effort to keep their "state" and society physically and psychologically broken. It has a routine, daily component and it has a periodic military component. Israel has a convenient punching bag and will never willingly give it up.

What I don't get, though I admit I don't follow the MSM very closely on this, is that there seems to be no questioning from the media, even on a basic practical level, of Israel's military strategy in invading the world's largest refugee camp.

A proper military incursion has specific objectives and lays out specific, multiple, overlapping means of accomplishing those objectives. Traditionally, if this planning doesn't occur, officers get sacked. Even Rumsfeld targeted the lives/bodies of Saddam and his cronies as an objective, and bent air and land power toward achieving it.

Legitimate military objectives can include forcing a political entity to admit defeat, to let your forces into its territory, let you disarm its combatants---perhaps even blow up its industrial capacity and jail large numbers of adult men. Even a declaration of total war claims this as its objective, assuming the enemy is deemed unlikely to surrender. (Has Israel actually declared total war on Hamas, or just borrowed some rhetoric?)

But none of this applies in Gaza. Israel cannot stop the supply of cheap rockets into Gaza. It cannot stop Palestinians from hating Israel, and from firing rockets. It cannot remove Hamas, and indeed has just admitted that it has not succeeded in this and will not succeed. I assume they knew that this was not possible; I assume they didn't really try.

If Israel sent in 100 commandos to kill off Hamas' political leadership, this would be illegal but at least it would be a clear objective. Instead, Israel simply blows up buildings with civilians in them. I have heard of no high ground seized, no heights, no facilities, no arms depots, no symbolic seat of government burned---nothing.

So what conclusion is left but that either (a) Israel's military is incompetent or (2) Israel's military is being used in a plainly nonmilitary, near-genocidal manner?

You don't need to be anti-Israel to notice this and wonder about it.