The Israeli military’s use of social media to send chilling messages to Hamas continues:
We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012
The IDF’s Twitter account is not without its dissenters:
Good lord. It’s official, the Israeli army spokesperson has turned Gaza operation name into a hashtag #PillarOfDefense
— joseph dana (@ibnezra) November 14, 2012
But apparently, the better translation is “pillar of cloud” or “pillar of smoke”. And there’s this of course, put out by the IDF:
And they posted a video of that assassination, which we embedded here. I think Israel has a right to self-defense against the rockets being randomly fired toward their civilian population. But I do not recognize the Western concepts of just war and self-defense in these macho posturings about war. There is a relish about the use of disproportionate technology and force that I suppose tells us something about what living under siege can do to the psyches of human beings. The dehumanization of the enemy is also helped in part by distant electronic and video monitoring and broadcasting of deaths on the ground, as if this were a video game. It makes me think again about the question of the moral use of drone warfare.
And it’s hard to disagree with this tweeter:
A Twitter hashtag #gazaunderattack has been created as a response. And Mondoweiss is reporting from the area:
This guy with the pony tail told me “Arabs are less than dogs, kill them all.”What a nice day. twitter.com/scottroth76/st…
— Scott Roth (@scottroth76) November 15, 2012
If you doubt this is a religious war, fueled in part by religious fundamentalism as well as self-defense, note that the IDF called their operation after a Biblical verse:
This operation is named in reference to a biblical passage in which a pillar of cloud protects the Israelites as they wandered in the desert after leaving bondage in Egypt.
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; that they might go by day and by night. Exodus 13:21
It is unseemly to invoke the protection afforded the Israelites wandering in the desert when Israel is the dominant military power in the region.
Goldblog asks the core question:
What is the strategy? The fact remains that there is no long-term military solution to the challenge posed by Gaza, but the Israeli government doesn’t want to acknowledge this.
There are enough weapons, and enough young men in Gaza ready to use those weapons, to make life miserable for millions of Israelis for years to come, barring a full-scale invasion by the IDF of Gaza that wipes out the entire military structure of Hamas. And good luck with that, by the way — good luck to Bibi getting the world to acquiesce.
Netanyahu’s failure to convince the world that he is serious about compromise (he might have succeeded, given his Palestinian counterpart’s own alternately lackadaisical and obstreperous approach to peace talks, if he wasn’t hell-bent on growing settlements) means that he has no political capital to spend.
Funny, too, isn’t it, that this is the second Gaza war launched after a US presidential election elected Barack Obama. No coincidence, right? Or a deadly message about this Israeli government’s determination to take the fight to its enemies, regardless of long-term strategic goals?
The Dish 