Monday, November 19, 2012

No Defense Of The Indefensible

There's a huge difference between Israel's right to defend itself (which Palestinians in Gaza never seem to be entitled to) and what the son of former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon wants to do.  Maj. Gilad Sharon took to the Jerusalem Post with this missive:

The desire to prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.
[...]
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.
There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.
Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.
If the government isn’t prepared to go all the way on this, it will mean reoccupying the entire Gaza Strip. Not a few neighborhoods in the suburbs, as with Cast Lead, but the entire Strip, like in Defensive Shield, so that rockets can no longer be fired.
There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.

There's a term for what Gilad Sharon wants to do here.  It's called "genocide".  That it is coming from an Israeli Jew is no small amount of irony.  When I said in yesterday's podcast that I feared this time would be different, that this time Israel would "go all the way on this" as Sharon so ghoulishly remarks without pity or remorse, this is why I believe it is coming unless there's a surprising and breathtaking turn of events that leads to a cease fire.

I hope for the latter.  I fully expect the former, except this time it will be tens of thousands of Palestinians who will die, along with hundreds of Israelis, before the fighting dies down for a bit.

We'll see.  I am not very optimistic.

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