Israelis know that the IDF does not deliberately kill civilians. We know this because we are the IDF—because our sons, our neighbors’ sons, have been fighting in Gaza. We know that dead Palestinian civilians serve the interests only of Hamas, not Israel, whose military operations in the past were either curtailed or halted altogether by an errant shell that exploded in a classroom or a refugee shelter. We know that mistakes happen in war because, unlike many of Israel’s critics in the West, Israelis know war. We know that houses in Gaza were booby-trapped, that schools and mosques concealed arms caches and entrances to tunnels and were repeatedly used as launching pads for rockets. And we knew, from previous experience, that the Hamas figures of civilian casualties, uncritically adopted by most of the media in the first weeks of the war, would turn out to be lies, and that the real proportion of civilian to combatant deaths would become clearer. In early August, The New York Times and the BBC noted the disproportionate number of combat age males among the almost 2,000 deaths then recorded in Gaza. But those predictable revelations have come too late to change widespread perceptions about Israelis as baby killers. newrepublic/article/119244/2014-gaza-conflict-part-hamas-long-effective-war-israel
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 17:45:19 +0000
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