Slaughter of the Innocents: Gazza and Israel

 

Nightly images of dead and dying children from Gazza are a mute argument against the Israeli strategy of counter terrorism.

You come and slaughter our children and rape our women, look what you get in return!

The problem is with the "you."

Those Palestinian children did not rape your women.

It's a question of what you are willing to allow to respond to an outrage.

And it's also a question of the enemy your are fighting.

In the 1940's, there was Hitler and the Japanese military. If you ravaged civilians on your way to defeating the German and Japanese armies and navies, there was a clear outcome you could point to: Hitler dead, the Japanese military defeated and surrendering on the deck of an American battleship, and it's all over.

Never mind all those innocent children you incinerated in Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Tokyo and countless other cities and towns around the world.

They were "innocent" bystanders, but we were willing for them to suffer to accomplish the greater good of a military victory, an end to that war.

And then there was always the question of whether those children and their families were completely "innocent" or actually "willing accomplices." 

In the case of Germany, it is now pretty clear a sizable part of the population, including children in the Hitler youth, fully embraced the stuff Goebbels was feeding them about being part of a master race and the need to exterminate the  vermin Untermensch.

 But isn't a twelve year old boy so malleable as to be innocent for having been recruited into that gang? What is "innocent" in a child? The American army executed 16 year old boys who acted as spies for the German army when the Americans swept into Germany. But, of course, those kids were post pubertal. In Gazza we are seeing 7 year old kids dying. What kind of threat could they be?

Those Gazza kids and their parents are more powerful than any Israeli bomb, simply from a strategic viewpoint. In practical terms alone, the Israelis are simply stupid to drop bombs on them.

You cannot defeat an idea. You cannot kill hatred with bombs. Couldn't do it in Belfast. Couldn't do it in Selma, Alabama. You have to find another way. 

You bomb a church in Birmingham and kill four little Black girls, you've already lost the war. The wives who sent off their husbands with packed lunches to the Ku Klux Klan rallies have to watch the images of those dead girls on TV and everything begins to crumble.