This I condemn.

[caliban18]

I offer my total and complete condemnation. These horrible acts among Palestinians by Israeli ordinance is wrong. It is wrongheaded. It is completely contrary to everything that I believe makes me a Jew. If there is a place for it in our Law, I am ashamed

Comments

[caliban18]

Actually, I think this could be a perfectly inevitable response to having missiles and explosives tossed at your cities for months on end. Israel is quite right in her frustration. In any other country, if this kind of brazen provocation had gone on at all, the country would have gone in and flattened the source of the provocation long ago. Completely. What I am asking for is Israel to do something that is not inevitable. I believe in her ability to do so, because frankly I feel there are few nations filled with citizens as sensitized to violence.

Is this an action in the dying days of a permissive Bush era? Perhaps. It is possible, but really I think the driving force is a population screaming that it isn't going to put up with incessant attacks from neighbours anymore and internally, leadership cannot maintain any credibility without some kind of response.

The problem is a cycle of inevitability. It is inevitable that suicide bombs and these rocket attacks will create this kind of response. It is inevitable that this kind of response will lead to more suicide bombings and will do little to impact the ability to launch rockets. So each enemy becomes the instrument of the other. What truly scares me is that this is actually a conscious process. Being used by both sides.