Mowing the Grass

Submitted by Michael S (United States), May 29, 2015 at 03:53

Hi, Yuval

You give a fair analysis, from someone who has to live in the shadow of Gazan rockets.

During Israel's most recent "lawn mowing" of the Gazan rocket-weeds, I was hoping Israel would completely take over the territory, destroy the Gazan weapons and kill or imprison its soldiers. I can see now, that would have been a costly operation in terms of Israeli lives and money, and would have been followed by an israeli withdrawal and a quick return to the pre-war situation. As long as the Americans and Europeans side with Gaza and prop them up with a steady influx of cash rewards for their bad behavior, Israel is continually at a disadvantage. What Netanyahu did, therefore, bombing them to relative quietness and then ceasing fire, seems to have turned out to be the best policy.

This reminds me of something from Orwell's "1984":

In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths.

The Muslims seem, for the most part, like children who keep on getting scalded by putting their hands on hot burners, yet they never learn not to do it. As long as they persist, I can't see any end in sight to their current plight.

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