The self-defence defence

Wartime in Israel is effectively a totalitarian blackout: objectors are denounced as traitors and suppressed or sidelined, while the media almost entirely ignores the consequences of Israeli military actions. This is partly down to self-censorship and partly down to the codes of a military censor.

But now that Israelis can ask themselves all those difficult questions that were zealously avoided during the past three weeks, will they?

From the initial reactions this week, it doesn't look like it. In the past few days, radio commentators have been debating the wisdom of a military ban on soldiers discussing battleground details. Their concern is: if soldiers don't speak up about the Hamas horrors they faced in Gaza, how will the world remain convinced that the Israeli assault was necessary?

This has been a central theme of the war in Gaza: not that hundreds of innocent people were killed, not that over 5,000 were horribly injured and not the sky-high human and monetary cost of wrecking homes or razing infrastructure. Even as Palestinian bodies are still being pulled out from the rubble in Gaza, one prominent facet of Israel's internal discussion is how to keep the Western world resolute in the belief that it was all justified – and just.


Edited to 3-4 paragraphs to conform to DU's fair use policy for copyrighted material

Lithos
DU Moderator

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/23/israelandthepalestinians-gaza

and the ignorant fearful cheer him on.

Why does Israel's use of high-tech weaponry to indiscriminately bomb civilian areas cause fewer deaths than were caused by low-tech Hutu attacks on Tutsis? Perhaps Israel is not a credible threat to world peace. Perhaps Israel's military is much less powerful than the Hutu militias of 1994.


Source:
http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm

that the IDF could afford to take their time. They left their "warzone" on their own timetable, having taught the Gazans a lesson to remember.
In fact the military disparity is so overwhelming that it's correct to say that what Israel was doing in Gaza was straightforward operant conditioning, like the crudest Pavlovian would condition a dog. I saw this vid just now showing how the IDF tanks and armored bulldozers cleared a few entire villages. I mean, the entire things. But nicely, to show how polite they were, they served notice to leave or else, first.

Is that a fair statement?

is more efficient. There is also the fact that in Rwanda it was literally neighbor against neighbor sometimes family member against family member, the guy you were joking with over a beer yesterday was coming at you with a machete the next, just a bit harder to defend against, not to mention no one was watching as it were perhaps if the Hutu had F16's there would have been more attention paid