Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Gaza Israel Palestine

Israel is "defending itself" against a people that it dispossessed and
has occupied for decades, and specifically by bombing a densely
populated territory that it has been collectively punishing for a year
and a half. Collective punishment is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. By bombing universities, mosques, lines of graduating police recruits, farms
and houses filled with women and children, Israel is violating the law
of proportional response. It is the same strategy it pursued in its
disastrous 2006 war against Lebanon, when it fired thousands of cluster
bombs into civilian areas in the south so as to force a Shiite
population transfer, and piling up heaps of corpses with the purpose of
"bolstering its deterrence."
Such actions, in which civilian casualties are accepted or even pursued
in the interests of achieving strategic goals, are a textbook form of
state terrorism, and under the circumstances of Israel's vise-grip on
Palestinian lives, no more morally justifiable than Hamas' repellent attacks. America should not be supporting such actions, whether they are carried out by an ally or not.
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