Israel Matzav

Hamas and the Killing of Innocents

Israel has a stated policy of doing everything possible to limit Palestinian civilian casualties. But the trouble with that policy is that it provides no incentive to non-terrorist Palestinians to stop tolerating Hamas or other terrorist groups. The non-terrorist Palestinians, the Israeli Arabs who are pro-Palestinian the Arabs in the wider Middle East, the Iranians and the other non-Arab Muslims, those Americans and Europeans who hide their anti-Semitism behind anti-Israelism do not hate the Jewish state less because it has allowed its fear of causing Palestinian casualties to cloud both its military judgment and the proven principles of psychological warfare.

If it is true that in war there is no substitute for victory, it is truer that victory comes only when the victor breaks the will of the vanquished. One vanquishes an enemy not by winning his heart and mind, but by crushing him militarily.

In the months prior to the end of the Second World War, the United States and Britain launched massive aerial bombings — sometimes they sent a thousand bombers at a time — over German cities, and America dropped atomic bombs over two Japanese cities. Neither President Delano Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, nor the American and British people fretted over enemy civilian casualties. On the contrary, they were absolutely convinced that such casualties would make the Germans and the Japanese surrender more quickly.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:43 PM