Sometimes I can be a slow puppy, but I just happened to *look* at the geography of Israel and the Gaza Strip. It kinda shook me, because I instinctively think about things on sorta an American scale, where out west the distance between *anywhere* is measured in hundreds -- if not a thousand or two -- miles. Its easy to see why the Israelis have security concerns -- modern tanks could bisect Israel at its narrowest in about 15 *minutes*. Thats *minutes*. Not a lot of time for mounting a defense. Paranoia may be a reasonable response. On the Palestinian side, Gaza is roughly a 6 x 20 mile box. Tiny by *Los Angeles* standards. And theres nearly 2 million people packed into that space, which means theres an average population density of north of 10,000 people per square mile. Thats more densely populated than L.A. Now Hamas may be deliberately hugging civilians, but with that kind of population density it would be almost impossible to not do that. Im thinking about the 311th COSCOM (Corps Support Command), a National Guard unit in West L.A. If you shelled them, it would be easy to damage a hospital, a governmental admin center, and a whole bunch of other nearby civilian facilities. If you shelled the 1st Battalion of the 144th Field Artillery Regiment on the wrong day, you could take out the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, the Burbank Airport, and my much-beloved Frys Electronics. Geography thats as tightly-packed as Israel and Gaza is gonna be adding a whole thick additional layer of complexity on top of the basic messiness of the situation. (And I apologize if everyone else already understood how tightly packed the area is. Sometimes I can be just remarkably dense.) https://google/maps/place/Gaza+Strip/@31.6095742,35.9947567,8z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x14fd844104b258a9:0x7e8955cbe285984e
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:42:05 +0000
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