300 to 1 is disproportionate warfare [View all]

[cali]

there simply isn't any way around that, just as there is no way around killing civilians in a densely populated area. It is de facto collective punishment. People often ask: What if Canada/Mexico/Cuba was lobbing missiles at the U.S.? Here's my answer: If the U.S. could manage to keep it's civilian population safe without killing many civilians, that's what I'd want to see happen. Not that that is in any way a legitimate argument. Juan Cole decimates here:

http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/rockets-assumes-colonial.html

and as Cole says:

<snip>The fact is that the Israelis could have peace if they’d stop being expansionists and accept 1967 borders. The Arab League made the offer. The Palestinians made the offer. The Israeli government is instead to determined to grab more and more Palestinian resources, including perhaps Gaza’s offshore natural gas.

Indeed, the Israeli Right has designs on other territory of its neighbors, having at one time or another tried to grab the Sinai Peninsula, southern Lebanon, parts of Syria, and its leaders keep talking about Israeli “interests” in Jordan’s Ghor Valley.

Mind you, I am an advocate of peaceful social action, and I condemn Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s deployment of rockets. They lack guidance systems and so they are inevitably indiscriminate as weapons, endangering non-combatants, which is a war crime. But I also condemn reckless Israeli air raids on Gaza camps and cities, which a prudent person could foresee will cause non-combatant deaths. They are also war crimes.