Originally posted by Mike
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On the basic issue of supporting Israel, I'm not sure the poll numbers DSL quotes are reliable. For example, "do you support Israel? Yes. do you support Israel bombing Hamas to affect their demise as a military and political entity in Gaza?" I won't even hazard a guess of the numbers of people in the US that would still say yes to the question framed as I just did even though Palestinian leadership have rejected every peace plan put before them for decades. That's the problem. Sure, we love Israel but to keep Israel on the map in the ME and Israeli citizens safe, the terrorists and their financiers have to be neutered at worst, eliminated at best. A world that we live in following 50 + years of relative peace, has lost sight of the cost of freedom.
If I'm a military and political analyst hunkered down with Israel's war cabinet, I'd be saying since Israel can't exist in peace with Palestinian terrorists your options are to continue to let world opinion, shaped by the terrorists, chip away at your right to exist which would ultimately end in Israel's demise, or eliminate the immediate threat (Hamas) and establish control over what might follow (the threat of a new generation of Arab Jew haters.)
When it comes to the nut-cutting, westerners that support Israel sing a different tune. I believe the hesitancy of freedom loving nations to say it's fine for Israel to bomb Hamas into extinction - Gantz and Netanyahu have essentially said that's Israel's military goal (oh, the horror) - is because a global majority fails to grasp what these evil fucks are up to. The current Israeli government does and are acting on it. This in the face of a press firestorm of criticism of that "unattainable goal," critics say. The press has clearly made Israel the bad guys and the Palestinian leadership the good guys. The only thing that's holding Israel back from leveling Gaza, rounding up the Hamas leadership from the debris and establishing a military style government in what the Palestinians call "occupied lands" is the blow-back precipitated by constant news focusing on civilian casualties and the vivid suffering of "the children." Where are the Churchills and Roosevelts of our time.
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