Gazans are remembering their dead after Israel’s attack.
But according to the New York Times:
In the year since Israel launched its devastating military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, the country’s political and military leaders have faced intense international condemnation and accusations of possible war crimes.
But Israel seems to have few qualms. Officials and experts familiar with the country’s military doctrine say that given the growing threats from Iranian-backed militant organizations both in Gaza and in Lebanon, Israel will probably find itself fighting another, similar kind of war.
Only next time, some here suggest, Israel will apply more force.
“The next round will be different, but not in the way people think,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former chief of Israel’s National Security Council. “The only way to be successful is to take much harsher action.”
Such talk has raised alarm among some critics in Israel, but so far it has stirred little public debate.
These actions are only allowed to continue because the Western world, including the US, Australia and the UK, continues to provide political and military cover for war crimes.
Ben White, writing on Al-Jazeera English, explains how these kinds of wars are part of Israel’s inner logic:
That this was a “carefully planned” assault intended “to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” was clear at the time.
The Jerusalem Post reported Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, as saying that Israel’s aim was to “to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel”.
As hundreds of Palestinians were being killed, The Washington Post related how the “hope” of Israeli officials was that “Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power”.
An Israeli ex-national security adviser told The New York Times that “the terrible devastation” caused by going beyond just “military targets” would lead to “a lot of political pressure” on Hamas.
Targeting civilians to advance a political goal is a standard definition of terrorism: in the words of the US state department, “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets”. US federal law describes terrorism as violence or “life-threatening acts” apparently intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”.
A final part of Israel’s political strategy for the Gaza Strip is to turn the territory into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, its population rendered utterly dependent on international aid. This is the strategy of ‘de-development’ that has been going on for decades and which is now intensified and more brutal.
(I refer to the Lebanon War and the supposed militant threat)
Forgive me,
As much as Israel deserves a defeat against an oppressed people who have been reduced to using terrorism, as opposed to either starving to death or having their entire live’s controlled by a foreign occupier (who’s callous oppression of others is incredibly hypocritical), there is no way that what happened in Lebanon was what is referred to by the Hezbollah as a divine victory.
I saw the carnage caused in Lebanon and it’s a total disgrace what Israel did to civilian infrastructure (not including the 4,000,000 cluster munitions dropped in the South). Mearsheimer and Walt described Israel’s shady conduct fairly accurately when they mentioned and I’m paraphrasing, that Israel delayed going after Hezbollah to reap destruction on the civilian population. Let’s see through the canon fodder that has perforated down through the media and admit that Israel was begging for an excuse to undo the humiliation that they received from their forced retreat from the south in 2000.
Do you honestly think that with all of Israel’s intelligence capabilities, all of it’s resources and with the congress in America at it’s desposable it couldn’t have blasted Hezbollah’s infrastructure into last century, not withstanding that it could have destroyed the entire movement if it wanted to??? please……..It had absolutely nothing to do with defeating Hezbollah. It is in Israel’s (public relations) interest that the region remain in chaos and that Israel has enemies that want to destory it. This gives Israel an excuse to continue it’s colonization of the West Bank and the seige in Gaza. It is also used as a tool to mobilize the Diaspora community reinforcing the sacred myth that Israel holds so close to it’s heart “Total Annihilation”
If Israel could destroy it’s enemies which it could do tomorrow and has had the chance in the past, there would be no excuse for war, unrest, nuclear weapons, it’s oppression of “the terrorists” and the list of the victim state can go on and on and on.
Everything is carefully planned.