Israel Matzav

Making noise but nothing decisive

All three of the mainstream English language newspaper web sites scream with headlines about how Israel is 'escalating its operations' and bombed the 'Palestinian Interior Ministry.' Forgive me if I am a bit more blunt: Israel bombed a bunch of empty buildings from the air early this morning. The ground troops that are necessary to take out the mobile Kassam batteries and to find Gilad Shalit (if he is still alive) are nowhere in site. Remember the US invasion of Iraq in 1991? Six weeks of aerial bombing that changed nothing and then a ground invasion that overran the country in about five days. Let's just hope the real ground invasion of Gaza is still coming.

The IDF reported that its planes had hit the 'Palestinian Interior Ministry' just after midnight last night. There were no reports of casualties. Two 'Palestinian security officers' were lightly wounded by shrapnel when IDF shells hit two transformers in Northern Gaza. Big deal. The IDF also hit a 'Hamas training camp' (translation: empty field) in Southern Gaza. No casualties there either.

The JPost has a bit more detailed description:

According to the IDF, 16 air strikes targeted access routes and open areas in southern Gaza. Seven additional strikes hit a weapons storage facility, an Aksa Martyrs Brigades office, the Interior Ministry building in Gaza City, a Hamas office and three training camps belonging to the Aksa Brigades and Hamas.

Translation: "We bombed empty roads, empty fields and empty buildings."

I've had a lot of new readers on this blog this week, and some of you may be wondering why I seem so bloodthirsty. Why do I want 'Palestinian casualties'? To understand that, I'd like to go back to an article from The American Thinker that I ran about six weeks ago:

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.

Things will only change if the 'Palestinians' get so disgusted with our bombing that instead of railing against the Jews and the Zionists all the time, they get up and throw the terrorists out of their midst. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen when the only things being bombed are empty roads, empty fields and empty government buildings. Think Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. I'm advocating the same idea that was used then. Military strategists have no doubt that the carpet bombing of Dresden and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved thousands of allied soldiers' lives through enemy civilian casualties. That's why I'm looking for 'Palestinian casualties' in Gaza: because I am tried of seeing Israeli soldiers and civilians die. I'm tired of seeing terrorists target Israeli children.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:12 AM