23 thoughts on “Question of the Day – Gaza”

  2. 1. It had better work — whatever that means–rather than being an expression of rage that results in dead children.
    2. Unlike the moral failings of Hamas, for which I do not feel responsible, the sight of F16s and Apache helicopters in the conflict makes me feel culpable.

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  5. It’s possible they’re recycling the same babies over and over. (Back in the day, Saddam Hussein had a big freezer where he kept a pile of dead Iraqi infants. He would display the contents to Western journalists to argue the cruelty of the oil embargo.)
    During the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict a while back, there were a lot of stories about staging of photos. A pristine dust-free tricycle kept showing up in photographs of rubble, etc.

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  7. I have great hope that Israel’s actions will work. In fact, I doubt that anything will work if, by working, you mean leading to a long-term peace acceptable to both sides.
    I don’t fault Israel for two reasons. First, I’m pretty certain that if the shoe were on the other foot (i.e. if Hamas ever get the upper hand militarily), the Israeli civilian casualities would be several orders of magnitude greater. Second, if my neighborhood were being hit by rockets launched from sites that were within range of my country’s artillery, I’d be demanding action much more forceful than what Israel is doing.

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  8. I think Israel is making a horribly cruel mistake. They are marginalizing the moderates and creating long-term consequences for themselves.
    We are culpable because we fund and supply them.

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  9. It’s possible they’re recycling the same babies over and over.
    Wow. Do you really doubt that many, many children are dying? Or are we just arguing about whether it is 250 or 350?

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  10. See, for me, the most important thing is whether MH hopes are right (it will work) or Will is right (it won’t work).
    The blame, MH’s two justifications — that Hamas would be worse, and that Israel is under threat, and just justified — don’t really work for me. India just suffered a massive and disturbing terrorist attack that many Indians believe would justify a similar invasion of Pakistan. If they did so, they would certainly do so with condemnation from the US, and a major motive for that reaction would be that it wouldn’t work, that it would start a wide scale and ineffective war.
    If Israel can create a framework for a long term resolution, we can look away with the knowledge that war is always ugly. But, if they get nothing more than a brief cease in the random rocket fire — well, that’s not worth it.

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  11. Sorry, I meant to say ‘no great hope it will work’ in the sense of any long term solution. I don’t think there is a solution within this century. I think another cease fire is all that can be hoped for in the short term and that attacking Hamas is the only plausible way to get it.
    Also, if anybody thought that India could gain control of Pakistan as easily as Israel can gain control of Gaza, they would have U.S support. I’m not sure what will happen when Pakistan falls apart, but I’m fairly certain that when it does, India’s actions won’t be a surprise to the U.S. and vice versa.

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  12. Sorry, I meant to say ‘no great hope it will work’ in the sense of any long term solution. I don’t think there is a solution within this century.
    Also, if anybody thought that India could gain control the parts of Pakistan that Pakistan can’t control right now, they would have U.S support.

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  13. Well, I can’t say I finished Goldberg’s piece thinking he’d made his point. Leaving bodies unburied is morally more repulsive than killing them in the first place? Hamas IS in fact repulsive, but Goldberg lost me there.
    My take on the babies in the news? They’re more compelling civilian victims than adults. It makes for gut-wrenching photography. But of course it would take the written word and more nuance than I can muster to untangle the competing threads of responsiblity for those dead children: Hamas’s for “governing” Gaza into the ground, Hamas’s for launching asymmetrical war from one of the most crowded places on earth, Israel’s for knowingly targeting military threats embedded in civilian space, all the region’s leaders for not having the desire or the ability to broker a solution decades ago.
    I get almost all my news from the radio, so my response to the photos has been mediated entirely through (primarily family/diary) blogs.

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  14. bj,
    But Pakistan has nukes. Once you join that club, you’re untouchable (*knocks on wood*). If Pakistan had no nukes, both American and Indian foreign policy would both be completely different.
    will,
    I don’t know. All I do know is that seeing isn’t believing, and staged photos and video are a regional specialty.

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  15. Well, MH, if all they get out of this is a cease fire on rockets being launched into Israel, the dead children, the dead civilians, and the loss of any real future in Gaza are not worth it. I don’t think it will work, for that purpose, either, for longer than 6 months or a year.
    If Israel can “gain control of Gaza” I expect a lot more than a cease fire. Then, Gaza becomes the “territory [Israel] governs” and I expect an awful lot more of them than Hamas. They’ll need to prove that “[Israel] sure cares about the people in the territory it governs!”

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  16. “loss of any real future in Gaza…”
    That’s probably the difference between our perspectives. I’m very doubtful that any Israeli (or U.S.) action at this point could further damage the future of Gaza. Or improve it.

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  17. ” I’m very doubtful that any Israeli (or U.S.) action at this point could further damage the future of Gaza. Or improve it.”
    Killing 700 people damages the future of Gaza. Period. Unless it has some benefit. I think Gaza’s future might be improved by breaking Hamas. If that’s the purpose of this invasion, the Israeli’s are taking over a massive task, and one that they failed at before — taking over the governing of Gaza. But they might be able to justify their actions, and the massive reaction, and the cost to Gaaza’s people, if that was their plan.
    No one seems to really know what the plan is, though, and I can only hope that the Israelis actually have a secret plan.

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  19. On my way home, I was delayed by a largish (75 people or so) protest. Their demonstration targeted Israel (based on the signs) and people trying to go east on Forbes (based on the effect).

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  20. MH,
    You might want to explain to the non-Pittsburghers that the neighborhood you’re talking about is historically Jewish, although the location might have been chosen just because it was handy for student protesters. What were the demographics of the protesters? Was it a campus lefty thing, more ethnically based, or both?
    You may have seen the youtube of a recent confrontation in Ft. Lauderdale between supporters of Israel and Gaza. These things are popping up in the most unlikely places.

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  21. They were right on campus, not in Squirrel Hill. They just picked the most visible location that was convenient. It was mostly kids, white and middle class looking. The older people present looked to be university types. Somebody was holding an Israeli flag, but I don’t think it was counter protest. They were in a group with people holding signs in support of Gaza.

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  22. “That depends on which 700 people.”
    Which 700 people would it be good to kill –for the future of Gaza and Israel? And, are the Israelis succeeding in killing them? (and not, as Kristof reports, the eleven year old girl that has her father turning to Hamas for revenge)?
    Like Obama, I’m not against war, just dumb ones. Dumb being ones that don’t get you what you need. War is a bludgeon of a weapon that is difficult to use to get to one’s objective. I think this flaw in war as a tool was understood, in the olden days, when the cost of war was so high. Now, though, people think they’re going to use F16’s and distant artillery, and the decision to start a war becomes easier. But, it isn’t any easier to use it to get what you’re trying to win.

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  23. “I think this flaw in war as a tool was understood, in the olden days, when the cost of war was so high.”
    I’m not so sure–it depends what you mean by “olden days”. I was just skimming over the biography of Dante Alighieri over at Wikipedia to refresh my memory. These people in Renaissance Italy were fighting basically all the time. I was also looking at the short Wikipedia article on Catherine of Siena. Paradoxically, she was both an advocate for peace among the warring Italian states, as well as for a new Crusade. I read a book on her a number of years ago, and I believe the two things may have been related. I may be remembering this wrong, but Catherines may have wanted the Crusade in part as a way to redirect the energies of people who were destroying their own homelands with incessant fighting.
    One wonders sometimes whether peace isn’t actually a very unnatural state for members of our species.

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