It probably didn't get very far because nobody wants a balanced view. People just want to get emotive and righteous about their preferred position, while ignoring other positions, and other equally important crises. I have seriously considered starting a thread about this: what exactly is it about the Israel/Palestine thing that sends people over the top? It's an interesting question, because those same people often have little or no reaction to other international issues that are just as brutal, or even more so. It seems to be something specific to Israel/Palestine. Although the reasons are obvious in the cases of religious nutters from all three Abrahamic religions, they are not obvious in the case of less religious or non-religious people.
Of course, such a thread would probably turn into a flame war PDQ.
Anyway, this turned up today. The author is ex-IDF and not at all impressed with Israel's recent tactics in Gaza, but is realistic enough to assume that there will most likely be conflict in future and is concerned with how it should be conducted. This also raises issues that should be considered for UN conventions on armed conflict in general.
My time in Israeli Defence Force tells me the level of casualties in Gaza is avoidableIn the 1982 Lebanon war I served as an Israeli artillery forward observer, my task to pinpoint the PLO’s positions and call in fire from our artillery units. We stayed in the evacuated Al Jamous School, overlooking Beirut. The routine was simple enough: I would pop into the classroom next door from where I would collect the co-ordinates and description of my military targets: “a military camp”, “a mortar”, “an antenna”. I would then return to my room and, looking out of the windows, I would direct our fire on the targets.
<snip>
Now to Gaza where, like in 1982 Beirut, the Israeli army is using overwhelming military power to locate and destroy Hamas’s tunnels, to stop them firing rockets into Israel – and also to put pressure on the Gazans (as we had pressured the Beirutis) so they turn their backs on Hamas as a political force.
In the process, just as in Lebanon, hundreds of innocent Palestinians have been killed and parts of Gaza, as some sections of 1982 Beirut, have been turned into wastelands. Even worst, UN schools in Gaza which are shelters to more than 250,000 refugees, and their hospitals have also been hit by Israeli artillery and bombs.
Wayward artillery
Can anything be done so that in the next round between Israel and Hamas, which is inevitable, there would be fewer innocent civilian casualties?
The answer to this question is yes. It is indeed possible to reduce the number of casualties on the Palestinian side, but this would require a modification of the Israeli army’s rules of engagement, namely the way it operates, particularly when in close proximity to schools, hospitals and other shelters.
For example, as an artillery officer I know that even now – with advanced technologies – artillery fire is unreliable. As an artillery forward observer, I always looked up to the sky, praying my shells hit the targets and not land on my head. Artillery shells have a strange habit of going astray.
Read the whole thing on the link.
Topic: A balanced POV on the Israel/Palestine debate