I post this as a counter to those who assume that the Israeli people are totally insensitive to the body counts or the war. More below the flip.
This is a new and particularly pernicious type of war.
According to dictionary.com, pernicious means "Tending to cause death or serious injury; deadly." or "highly injurious or destructive: tending to a fatal issue." So the piece opens, and I believe that is very accurate.
For the first time in a long time, the Israeli homeland is coming under direct attack. 1/4 of the country is uninhabitable for reasons of safety. The piece estimates Hezbollah's arsenal of rockets and missiles at 10,000 to 14,000 pieces with hundreds raining down each and every day. Where are they coming from?
These thousands upon thousands of rockets are being launched into Israel's towns and villages from the very heart of residential Lebanese neighborhoods, whether with the support or to the dismay of the local populace.
So what can Israel do? That is the core of the piece.
But Israel could prevail in this conflict. Israel could silence the Katyusha launchers. What it would need do is resort to one of those two options - a much greater use of air power or a larger ground offensive.Either of those avenues, however, would necessarily involve death on a far larger scale than we have seen thus far. Pulverizing air power would likely create Lebanese civilian casualties of a number that would dwarf the toll to date.
Israel would "win." By that, Israel could eliminate the military threat against itself. However the cost of doing so would be high. If ground forces were used, then yes, the IDF would suffer high casualties, but before the author even gets into that, the point is acknowledged that there would be massive Lebanese civilian casualties.
Hezbollah has no problem using Lebanese civilians as human shields - Hezbollah does not have to contend with Western ethics and morals as that is not their culture. Israel is largely founded by Europeans who share common roots with us as far as right and wrong.
The author continues by pointing out that right now the choice looks to be either dead Lebanese (by increasing the military attacks on Lebanon) or dead Israelis (by allowing the rocket attacks to continue). So why won't Israel escalate? Three reasons are listed:
1) A more forceful attack could lead to short term gain and long term loss as Israel finds itself with no international support
2) Israel feels that its responses thus far have not been disproportionate to the attacks - despite what others in the world community and here on dKos may argue. However, any escalation would be disproportionate response:
That sense of proportion has evidently determined that dozens of deaths at home, hundreds of thousands of fleeing northerners, and 26 days in the bomb-shelters for those who have remained in rocket range justifies the degree and scale of air power that it has employed to date, and no more.
3) The "main limitation" against escalation is Israel's "sense of right and wrong." Israel doesn't want its troops getting killed or Lebanese civilians getting killed and so doesn't escalate.
The first is practical, the second a balance between practical and ethical, the third strictly ethical.
And then the author gets into one of my pet peeves about Israel - they need to find a better PR firm. I have often joked that the Israelis and the Democrats both use the same losing PR firm over and over again while the Republicans and Arabs know how to play the game. Maybe that's just me feeling that way.
Israel's official public relations performance in the course of this conflict has been, as ever, dire. It has failed to highlight that this is essentially a war against an Iran that publicly demands Israel's destruction. It has failed to effectively articulate how pernicious an enemy it faces - one that strikes Israel's citizens and delights in the fatalities inflicted, then cries foul to a responsive international community when Israel's attempts to stop the fire inevitably cause death and destruction. It has failed even to widely disseminate film that clearly shows where the Katyushas are being fired from; the footage of rockets flying out from Kana was released a full 12 hours after the world had been subjected to graphic coverage of the tragic consequences of Israel's response. It has failed, at the most basic level, to help a watching world differentiate between a guerrilla-terrorist aggressor subjugating Lebanon to its Iranian patron's will and an embattled sovereign nation attempting to protect itself.A major segment of international media, it should be noted, has emphatically chosen itself not to highlight that distinction - out of a sadly familiar combination of factors including ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, misguided self-perceived liberalism, in some cases anti-Semitism, in others fear for its own wellbeing in Arab host nations.
However the point of my diary isn't the subjective perceptions of slanted media coverage or PR, the point is the debate about the ethics. I think that greater Israel is torn about how best to conduct itself at this point vis-a-vis the Hezbollah terrorists and is very cognizant of the damage being done to the Lebanese civilians. I know that if we went by diary count, dKos is pretty squarely in the Arab camp on this issue - I did a diary looking at diary counts a couple weeks ago and the ratio was more than 10:1, and if you throw in the number of pro-Cynthia McKinney diaries that label AIPAC as akin to the devil that would skew it more ;). I just wanted to post something to counter the perception that the Israelis are just after blood and that they don't care about the Lebanese civilians. If they didn't care, then this would have been over already. It's similar to Jenin - the Israelis sent in ground troops and suffered similar casualties as the Palestinians, rather than bomb the snot out of Jenin and take no casualties but kill many innocents. Didn't help in that case that the media called it a "massacre" when later even the Palestinians claimed it as a military victory over Israel.
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