Sounds like Israel. What Israel is doing can in long term prove sort of suicidal. Let me tell you what’s it about, - it’s about a colonist state imposed by aliens over the natives, a state that doesn’t wish to return even the bloody 20% of what used to be Palestine (the remnants of Palestine within the Greenline make about 20% of historic Palestine).

So…resistance to all that is unnatural, illegitimate, … indiscriminate.. or what?

Compared to Israel, that’s almost Kiwi.

The truth is that Israel is far more comfortable with her neighbours than the Palestinians. Your claim about the claims of demise is just too much off the mark; Egypt, for instance, is practically taking orders from Israel while SHOOTING the Palestinians refugees at the Gaza wall. After this war is done, there will be a separate list of victims, - Palestinians killed by Egyptians soldiers on the border. Don’t tell me Israel is scared to have such neighbors as Mubarak and Abdullah of Jordan.

THE scale and ferocity of the onslaught on Gaza have been shocking, and the television images of civilian suffering wrench the heart. But however deplorable, Israel’s resort to military means to silence the rockets of Hamas should have been no surprise. This war has been a long time in the making.

Since Israel evacuated its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip three years ago, Palestinian groups in Gaza have fired thousands of rudimentary rockets and mortar bombs across the border, killing very few people but disrupting normal life in a swathe of southern Israel. They fired almost 300 between December 19th, when Hamas ignored Egypt’s entreaties and decided not to renew a six-month truce, and December 27th, when Israel started its bombing campaign (see article). To that extent, Israel is right to say it was provoked.

It is easy to point out from afar that barely a dozen Israelis had been killed by Palestinian rockets since the Gaza withdrawal. But few governments facing an election, as Israel’s is, would let their towns be peppered every day with rockets, no matter how ineffective. As Barack Obama said on a visit to one Israeli town in July, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” In recent months, moreover, Hamas has smuggled far more lethal rockets into its Gaza enclave, some of which are now landing in Israeli cities that were previously out of range. On its border with Lebanon, Israel already faces one radical non-state actor, Hizbullah, that is formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and has a powerful arsenal of Iranian-supplied missiles at its disposal. The Israelis are understandably reluctant to let a similar danger grow in Gaza.

And yet Israel should not be surprised by the torrent of indignation it has aroused from around the world. This is not just because people seldom back the side with the F-16s. In general, a war must pass three tests to be justified. A country must first have exhausted all other means of defending itself. The attack should be proportionate to the objective. And it must stand a reasonable chance of achieving its goal. On all three of these tests Israel is on shakier ground than it cares to admit.

It is true that Israel has put up with the rockets from Gaza for a long time. But it may have been able to stop the rockets another way. For it is not quite true that Israel’s only demand in respect of Gaza has been for quiet along the border. Israel has also been trying to undermine Hamas by clamping an economic blockade on Gaza, while boosting the economy of the West Bank, where the Palestinians’ more pliant secular movement, Fatah, holds sway. Even during the now-lapsed truce, Israel prevented all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering the strip. So although Israel was provoked, Hamas can claim that it was provoked too. If Israel had ended the blockade, Hamas may have renewed the truce. Indeed, on one reading of its motives, Hamas resumed fire to force Israel into a new truce on terms that would include opening the border.

On proportionality, the numbers speak for themselves—up to a point. After the first three days, some 350 Palestinians had been killed and only four Israelis. Neither common sense nor the laws of war require Israel to deviate from the usual rule, which is to kill as many enemies as you can and avoid casualties on your own side. Hamas was foolish to pick this uneven fight. But of the Palestinian dead, several score were civilians, and many others were policemen rather than combatants. Although both Western armies and their foes have killed far more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s interest should be to minimise the killing. The Palestinians it is bombing today will be its neighbours for ever.

This last point speaks to the test of effectiveness. Israel said at first that, much as it would like to topple Hamas, its present operation has the more limited aim of “changing reality” so that Hamas stops firing across the border. But as Israel learnt in Lebanon in 2006, this is far from easy. As with Hizbullah, Hamas’s “resistance” to Israel has made it popular and delivered it to power. It is most unlikely to bend the knee. Like Hizbullah, it will probably prefer to keep on firing no matter how hard it is hit, daring Israel to send its ground forces into a messy street fight in Gaza’s congested cities and refugee camps.

Can Israel have forgotten the lesson of Lebanon so soon? Hardly. If anything, its campaign against Hamas now is intended to compensate for its relative failure against Hizbullah then. With Iran’s nuclear threat on the horizon, and Iranian influence growing in both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is keen to remind its enemies that the Jewish state can still fight and still win. Precisely for that reason, despite its talk of a long campaign, it may be more receptive than it is letting on to an immediate ceasefire. Its aircraft have already pummelled almost every target in Gaza. Further military gains will be harder. A truce now, if Hamas really did stop its fire, could be presented to voters as the successful rehabilitation of Israeli deterrence.

A weak and pathetic tactic enveloped in a weak and pathetic strategy.

thinks there is a pre-history to that, no?

Death brings us together, I mean the new bloodshed has agitated our debative vigour and called the IAP birdies back to the nest.

Yes, but most of us don’t matter a slice of a donkey’s waste. Among those who matter, emotional opinions are extinct specie. Among those who matter, Israel’s lobbies are more important than noisy crowds. Please don’t portray Israel as a wretched pariah among nations, deprived of money, weapons, and public relations capabilities.

Possibly quotes ? Nations claiming desire for Israel’s demise..let’s start with Turkey. Or Jordan.
 

They’re poor and they’re native. Why citation marks?

you Mr genius, you don't making sense;

if someone will attack you in road and take your money...I bet that you wouldn't come to rape all his family

You have to be careful when talking about war crimes. You have to be able yo back it up. No just talk out of frustration and anger. I believe Israel had a chance to handle this situation better but squandered this chance. Please read this article which I wrote earlier.

 As for the present confilict, I feel that Israel handled this senario wrong right from the start. I believe that special commando, which Israel has, units should have been hunting these rocket launchers night and day over the eight year period over which this problem has been continued.

war crimes of last few days reached the level of 350 victims!!

International law forbids collective punishment

Says a person who doesn't have to live with air strikes, no health care, dependence on humanitarian aid...

This is just pure racism, the equivalent of saying every Israeli thinks the Palestinians should be wiped out, or something.

Asked if she hoped to become a martyr herself, Saraa – a beautiful child in a flowered hijab – vigorously nodded her head. “Of course,” she said. “It’s something to be proud of. Every Palestinian citizen hopes to be a martyr.”   

The mother of Muhammad Faisal Saksak, the 21-year-old suicide bomber who carried out Monday’s attack in Eilat, said she was aware of her son’s plan to blow himself up and that she had wished him “good luck.”
… The mother of nine said she was proud of her son for carrying out the suicide attack.

Its quite a Neanderthal view of the world, actually. I mean, I know this is the way the US/Israeli leaders think, but I'm surprised you put it so bluntly.

I'm not saying the Kassam rockets are justified (mostly because they seem to be achieving nothing), but I'm saying, why not look at it from the Palestinian side as well?

really absurd and  senseless arguments to justify massacres of whole citizens
israeli mediatic propaganda is snivelling theirs 2 deaths, and what ?

2 deaths against 380  in Palestinian side!

2 deaths against 380  in Palestinian side!

The 18 months of Israel's chokehold on the Gaza Strip was bound to incite rocket attacks.

But none of the rocket attacks warranted an attack as indiscriminate and bloody as this.

I can't really see Israel having a whole lot of choices

I think the outside influence does more harm than good right now.  We need to show goodwill and a desire for peace, but we need to make sure that the hands of regional and international actors are more constrained when it comes with the details of peace (and war). 

Does this surprise anyone?  I see no end in sight to this sort of thing because the world spends too much energy ripping Israel and not enough energy telling Hamas that it is responsible for its own ruin.  Every second we spend bashing Israel gives Hamas implicit legitimacy.  I'm not suggesting Israel can do no wrong - far from it.

I've had enough.  These parties are only more at odds with each other than before, and our meddling is just dragging it on.  Ignore them, come back in 25 or 30 years and see if any progress has been made.

If you find anything, anything at all, that is not true in these posts, please point them out.