I'm hardly beholden to the Israeli Embassy. I work VERY hard to be objective, because I recognize that I have a built-in bias due to my personal connections to Israel, Israelis, and Jerusalem. But every step, every day, every diary and every comment, I try to work against that bias. I ask, "Cui bono?" when Israel does something. And in this particular case, I think the answer to that question has to be, "Non bene." There is no good. There is only evil.
Evil in the deaths of innocents, evil in the loss of innocence, evil in my cousins forgetting that yes, the b'nai Yisrael obliterated the Amalekites, but Moses' own wife was a Midianite. Yes, Gideon's band fought the Philistines, but Ruth, the grandmother of King David, was a Moabite. Jews have, for centuries, venerated those who killed the enemy - but those who brought the enemy into the fold even more. Forgetting that, abandoning that - I'm ashamed of my cousins, although I too know too well the depths to which one can be driven by fear.
But the real evil is in the work that is done on the fringes. By those who pretend that Israel's fears are not a relic of a time when Jews had reason to fear. They pretend that there is no such thing as institutional memory. They scoff at the idea that almost two thousand years of constant persecution could perhaps leave a group of people with a wary feeling toward anyone outside of the group. If they're really out to get you, are you really paranoid?
This is NOT to suggest that Israel's current fears are justified. That's a different debate - one that I am not prepared to have here. The question before the house is whether or not people who don't know what they're talking about should avail themselves of the right to free speech.
As it is frequently said, `tis better to be silent and thought a fool than `tis to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I'm not saying that you don't have the right to speak - by all means, speak if you want. But ignorance and misinformation should be recognized as such and confronted by truth.
The truth, as near as I can see it, is this:
Israel has, for sufficient or insufficient reason, decided that it will pay any price and bear any burden to win back its kidnapped soldiers. The United States military, particularly the Marine Corps and special operations units, operate by the same ethic - that you DO NOT leave a comrade behind. I can't fault the idea.
The execution of said idea has been VERY poor. In particular, Israel's efforts to prevent needless civilian deaths have been at best pathetic and at worst criminal. Needless to say, I am appalled by this. But, lacking any contacts with the Israeli government (despite what the anti-Semites peeking around the corners of the Internets might tell you), I can't DO anything to fix this. Israel loves to claim it speaks for all Jews, everywhere - right up until that moment where a Jew calls them up and says, "If you represent me, then I want to register my opinion, so you can consider it in your actions." You know, like any American can do with their representatives. If you do that, Israel laughs in your ear and hangs up. Maybe not literally (the young woman I spoke to at the Embassy was very polite), but they don't really care what Jews think.
But again, I have digressed from the point of all of this, which is to ask whether YOU, sir, fail. Oh, you didn't know you were being tested? You're being tested for your ability to synthesize and analyze information when presented.
Let me give you some examples.
Example One
Example Two
Example Three
Those are from three different users, on one thread.
All of these comments have one thing in common - they all make reference to Israel's "high-precision weapons," or some variation on that phrase. Perhaps a lesson in artillery is in order.
Let me begin with a disclaimer: I am not an artilleryman. I've never dealt with it. But I did take the time to do some research before I posted this. One of the things that I've learned is that artillery specs refer to something called the "circular error probability," which means how close to the target you can guarantee a hit. CEP is used to determine how much explosive a given warhead needs to destroy the target - in other words if your weapon has a CEP of 13 meters (one number I've seen bandied about for a "high-precision weapon"), then you need to create a blast radius of 13 meters - that way, if you're on the edge of your CEP on a given shot, you still paint the target. EVERYONE uses this thinking in their artillery studies, so Israel ain't special.
But let's take this discussion to our specific question of Israeli "high-precision weapons." Israel has, to my knowledge, four missile types and three types of artillery in service at the moment.
Israeli weapons - scroll to "Rockets and Missiles"
Artillery listings
If you look at the information that's available on Wikipedia (use at your own risk, while admitting that at least one of the articles lists itself as out of date), you note that NONE of the articles include the CEP for that weapons system. Let's say that the minimum CEP for the systems listed here is thirteen meters. That's almost forty feet of error margin and blast radius. In my neighborhood, which is a fairly standard middle-class American suburban subdivision, that's the difference between nailing my house, and nailing the house across the street. In a tightly-packed urban environment, like, I dunno, Beirut, that's the difference between hitting the place where you think your enemy actually is, and hitting the day-care where your enemy's daughter plays.
And that is BUILT IN when artillery officers talk about their targets. Imagine what happens when you start factoring in the possibility of human error. At the risk of engaging in hyperbolic understatement, "Oops." It is, my friends, within the realm of possibility for human error to kill innocents - even innocent U.N. observers.
But let me say this: if it DOES turn out that someone (at whatever level) deliberately targetted innocent civilians and U.N. observers for ANY reason - I find it hard to believe that the Israeli populace would accept any explanation for that.
Back to the point. So, let us not bandy about the words "high-precision weapons" anymore, like we actually know what we're talking about. Because unless somebody here actually POSTS the CEPs for Israeli weapons systems, we don't know what we're talking about.
And if you use the words "high-precision weapons" without knowing how precise they are? Well, then, you, sir, fail.