It's not all that often you come across a photo of a war crime in progress:
That's white phosphorus being used in a populated area against human targets. This is unequivocally forbidden by the Geneva conventions.
As I said in the earlier thread, stuff like this is first to go out the window if it's militarily expedient -- and it makes all the whining about Hamas's bottle rockets seem just a wee bit hypocritical.
In Gaza, residents said they would welcome an end to the fighting but expressed skepticism a cease-fire can hold.
"Everybody wants the world to return to what it was. But I think it's empty words," said Ghadir Mohammed, who was forced to flee her Gaza City home because of the fighting. "Let's assume if Hamas fires a rocket, will they be quiet about it? Israel isn't the kind to be quiet."
A resident of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, which has been targeted by Hamas rockets, said the army needed to be sure there would be quiet in southern Israel before stopping the fight.
"For eight years, they have been shooting at us," said Yigal Hakmon, manager of a convenience store. "We can't stop in the middle. We have to finish. We have to kill all the Hamas people."
That doesn't really jive with the title of the article.Hamas has offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces leave Gaza within a week and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt are opened.
On my favorite lefty show last night, it was reported that with the inauguration preliminaries now in full swing, Israel is letting a few western reporters into Gaza in limited guided tours, riding around in tanks with Israeli military who have notebooks of talking points which they read as commentary, no extemporaneous remarks, and that pictures taken by the journalists are all viewed and deleted if necessary by Israeli overseers. This is NOT how journalism functions in a democracy--though I understand it's a war zone and all. To me it looks like a blatantly obvious attempt to control the message and the world image of this debacle.
hate to burst any bubbles but they're pretty much using the US army playbook there - don't remember 'embeded reporters' and all those presentations with nice graphics for a five minute news slot? Personally I think everyone in a democracy should be forced to watch the unedited news stright from every war their country is involved in but Israel is hardly exceptional on this one.
I came across this post, making a pretty good argument for Israel coming to terms with Hamas, from an Orthodox Jewish Zionist perspective: [ http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-jeffrey-goldberg-plans-to-give-west.html ]
Nothing dramatically new there, but IMO it answers Pladio's earlier question of "how can we make peace with people like this?" pretty well.
Edit: I browsed some more of that blog, and it was highly interesting. I think it would be especially interesting for Jews who are Zionists but unhappy with the way Israel has turned out; it offers pretty fresh perspectives attempting to reconcile what often seems to be the irreconcilable. I'm thinking of you, Pladio.
(For the record, I have no problems whatsoever with the kind of Zionism espoused by this "Jeremiah Haber," even if I don't entirely share his views.)
Edit 2: I read even more of the blog, and damn, I like this guy. Here's a short piece he did on IDF's information warfare regarding that strike on the UN-run school: [ http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-idf-covers-its-derrire-bombing-of.html ].
Edit 3: Wow, here he even uses almost identical turns of phrase as I did, earlier -- and then explains why a gentile like yrs trly is entitled to use them too: [ http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2007/09/singling-out-israel-for-moral.html ].
Are you sure you didn't write that last one? Bookmarked the site--some excellent, clear reasoning and presentation there.