Wrongthink About Israel Is America’s Thought-Crime

[rangerrebew]

Wrongthink About Israel Is America’s Thought-Crime
JUNE 2024BY PAUL GOTTFRIED
 
 

In Chronicles’ May issue, my colleague Edward Welsch took a critical stand with respect to U.S. financial support for Israel’s war in Gaza, particularly (as he’s said to me privately) since it’s led to so many civilian deaths. In his editorial “The Neoconservatives’ Latest Purge,” Welsch also targeted conservative establishment gatekeepers who brand as an anti-Semite anyone who questions the now-obligatory outpourings of unqualified Zionist sympathies.

Let me clarify my own view about the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

Israelis are forced to fight Hamas in what has become asymmetrical warfare. Since Hamas cannot match a better armed, more efficient fighting force in a conventional military engagement, they are instead driving the Israelis into a form of fighting which makes Israel look bad. Hamas has taken up military positions in hospitals and schools so that when the Israelis go on the offensive, they are bound to slaughter the innocent and vulnerable. The United States engaged in a similar kind of combat against the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, and many anticolonial struggles have been waged in this way. Guerillas, thus, have always been able to harness world opinion even when they couldn’t win on the battlefield.

It also seems to me that the Israelis, despite their usually efficient intelligence service, allowed hostile guerilla forces to build hundreds of miles of tunnels, some of it going from Gaza into Israel. At some point an investigation will take place as to why this all went unnoticed. The Israelis might have also avoided inflicting many thousands of civilian casualties if they had flooded the tunnels to kill or drive out their armed enemies before bombing heavily inhabited civilian areas. Even if the Israelis are trying to avoid civilian casualties, (and I believe they are), the type of warfare they are waging will make them inevitable.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/wrongthink-about-israel-is-americas-thought-crime/?oly_enc_id=8131J4795701G4S

[Smokin Joe]

I have little doubt flooding tunnels with either water or inert gas like CO2 was considered.
Water would have complicated recovery and assessment procedures, inert gas would have to be purged afterwords (and would raise the spectre of gas chambers, something historically reminiscent of last century's death camps--and no doubt repugnant to both Israel and the world.)

That Hamas and other terrorist organizations use the communities as human shields is nothing new. They've been launching missiles and mortar strikes from schools and hospitals for decades, so it's not much of a stretch to just digging in underneath such, and the presence of building with a high flow of people and transport makes it easier to stock up and move weapons and combatants.

Between the tunnels and hiding in plain sight, they've effectively taken pages out of Ho Chi Minh's playbook, and adapted those techniques.

Israel has the resolve, opportunity, and ability to negate that, if the world will quit assuming it knows more about their next door neighbors, and will quit supporting the terrorist organizations, so many of which are masquerading as benevolent NGOs.