I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.\u00a0 There is a \u201chunger strike\u201d going on at Princeton.\u00a0 One of the goofy kids there was a scrawny girl who said she has been on the hunger strike for almost one hundred and five hours.\u00a0 She hasn\u2019t had any solid food in all that time.\u00a0 So, I guess she\u2019s living on Gatorade and orange juice.\u00a0 And I thought, \u201cWell, she\u2019s gonna lose some of those extra pounds she\u2019s been trying to lose for the beach season.\u00a0 That\u2019s a plus.\u00a0 And then they started telling us of all the innocent people in Gaza; women and children that were starving and being killed by bullets and bombs.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s true.\u00a0 While the IDF and Hamas shoot it out, the human shields that Hamas has emplaced will be killed.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a horrible thing.\u00a0 But when Hamas went on a rampage back in October, they were killing men, women and children.\u00a0 And they weren\u2019t trying to shoot IDF soldiers hiding behind these people.\u00a0 They searched them out in civilian towns and murdered them face to face.\u00a0 They killed parents in front of their children.\u00a0 The murdered infants and then cut their heads off.\u00a0 They raped women and then killed them for good measure.\u00a0 Then they took some of these victims back to Gaza to add to their stock of human shields.<\/p>\n
So, if the Israelis want to prevent the next massacre how do they do that without capturing or killing Hamas?\u00a0 And if Hamas, as a policy, hides in the mass of Gazans how do you fight them without killing those they hide behind?\u00a0 When we burned down Dresden and Hiroshima, did we separate out the women and children?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Shouldn\u2019t the Hamas fighters confront the IDF face to face, man to man?\u00a0 Are they cowards?\u00a0 And shouldn\u2019t the \u201cinnocent\u201d Palestinians sneak away from Hamas and leave them to their fate?<\/p>\n
Most of these questions have no good answers.\u00a0 War is horrific even when it is only soldiers involved.\u00a0 What can you say about women and children dying in war?\u00a0 There are no words.\u00a0 But what do you do with an enemy that murders your women and children as a policy.\u00a0 That makes the need to destroy this enemy an existential imperative that overrides most of the moral sanctions against extreme actions.<\/p>\n
I wish there were a magic strategy that could be used against Hamas without harming a single Palestinian civilian.\u00a0 If there were one, I\u2019ll bet the IDF would be using it right now.\u00a0 But there isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
You know, I wonder what answer I\u2019d get if I asked one of the \u201cstarving\u201d hunger strikers a hypothetical.\u00a0 Now, under the strain of extreme starvation maybe she couldn\u2019t muster the clarity of thought to answer me but I\u2019d ask, \u201cWhat if you lived in a neighborhood and you had a family living next door that really hated your family?\u00a0 They were poor and dysfunctional and hated you because you were rich and happy.\u00a0 And let\u2019s say that several times the police were forced to come and arrest members of this family for attacking one of your siblings.\u00a0 And let\u2019s say that one day the worst members of this family went crazy and broke into your house and killed your parents and raped your sister and cut your baby brother\u2019s head off and kidnapped you little sister and took her back with them to their house.\u00a0 And you called the police and told them what had happened and they went to the house where the killers were but they came back later and said that they couldn\u2019t do anything because there were small children in the other house including your sister so it was too dangerous to attack them.\u00a0 So, they were just going to issue a warning to the killers not to do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n
How would that be?\u00a0 Would that make everything all right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.\u00a0 There is a \u201chunger strike\u201d going on at Princeton.\u00a0 One of the goofy kids there was a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4297,4269,2259],"class_list":["post-28754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-gaza","tag-israel","tag-middle-east"],"yoast_head":"\n