"The first cliché that usually comes into play in times such as these is the demand that Israel forgo any “disproportionate response.” NPR: “Egypt warns Israel not to take disproportionate action against Palestinians.” U.N. human-rights commissioner Volker Türk warns “all parties” against actions that would cause “disproportionate death and injury of civilians.” The cheap moral equivalency of the U.N. grandee is really something: Imagine the denunciations that would—rightly!—rain down upon Israel if they carried out a response that was even merely proportionate in terms of death and injury to civilians, a tit-for-tat operation going door-to-door and murdering innocents, kidnapping children, etc. The fact that a perfectly proportionate attack would constitute a gross crime against humanity tells us a great deal about the character of the combatants here. In a similar vein, the European Council on Foreign Relations warns Israel against “a full ground invasion and disproportionate attacks against Palestinian civilians,” again, as though the Israelis were engaged in the same kind of ISIS-style brutality as the Palestinians."I am unfailingly annoyed by the false moral equivalence that gets drawn between a terrorist attack that deliberately targets noncombatant civilians...children and the elderly...and parades their naked corpses in the streets, and a military response that does what it can to avoid collateral damage but accepts that some will occur because c'est la guerre.
Something tells me that Israel is about to do what they can to end the fighting capacity of Hamas for the foreseeable future, no matter how many skirts and playgrounds behind which Hamas attempts to hide.
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