am yisrael chai

I have been finding myself getting into a lot of fights with my jewish friends recently over the current conflict in Gaza. One of my dearest friends went as far as to say that I was abandoning israel. I can honestly say that no words have stung me so deeply (outside those involved in affairs of the heart) since I was teased as a child. I do not think she was that out of line, being that I can easily imagine how what I said could have been taken out of context.

My main issue is this: I hate those stupid qassam rocket counter applications on facebook. I see it as a trivialization of a humanitarian disaster. Over a thousand people have been killed in Gaza, many of them innocent civilians. Personally I don't give a damn about the militants that have been killed, in fact while I hate to see people die as a general rule, these guys probably deserve it. Counting the qassams is effectively trying to say that the suffering being inflicted upon us is equivalent to the people in gaza, that we are victims to. We are not the victims here, and saying that we are is an insult to everyone's intelligence. Israel is a military superpower that can kick anyone's ass 5 times over. The Palestinian people are the victims here. However, the Palestinians being the victims does not make Israel the antagonist. That is a role that clearly goes to hamas, an organization that has absolutely no care for the welfare of the people they supposedly defend, and in fact uses them as human shields so that a) the israel wont attack, and b) when they do the civilian death toll is nauseatingly high.

My objection with Israel than is not that they are acting as the bad guys, but it is that they are not acting as the smart guys. While I understand that a military action is necessary, an offensive of this magnitude is overboard. At the end of the day, I do not see how this military action will further the goals of peace. Israel's overpowering military has effectively dumbed the nation down on both a strategic and tactical level. When engaging in a military operation, it is important for the actor to set out an objective with a known path for accomplishing it. The strategy of bombing an area till they stop shooting at us is about as clumsy as one can get. I understand that there is a need for the occassional missile strike to take out a rocket site as it is fired, but israel is going far beyond that. What ever happened to the era of heroic raids by commandos infiltrating in burkas taking out a top militant target in the dead of night and the 007 style assassinations of terrorist leaders that made Mosad one of the most feared intelligence organizations on the planet? Bringing back these types of operations would result in far fewer civilian casualties. This would be of significant importance for reducing future recruitment efforts by terrorist groups, improve international perceptions of israel, and most importantly would be saving innocent lives. Isnt that what the good guys are supposed to do?