But I am reminded of the old addage "don't bring a knife to a gunfight". In my sense of fairness, if you bring a knife with the intent to murder and get shot instead, it's fair. This is what the Palestinians have done. We used overwhelming force on Yugoslavia and Afghanistan both -- without much condemnation. People understood. But in the case of the Jewish state, the outcry against even moderate defensive measures is prophetically biased against the Jewish state.
I’ll come back to it, but unless the wall is built on a clearly defensible line, the land annexed, and the population pacified, the wall will be a disaster. It will represent the of I think the furthest extent of Israel’s, and must be built with that in mind.
But I am reminded of the old addage "don't bring a knife to a gunfight". In my sense of fairness, if you bring a knife with the intent to murder and get shot instead, it's fair.
Naah, here’s a couple of adages , from someone who would understand this war.
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"This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. The best weapon in killing is a knife."
The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery,"
Col. John Paul Vann
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We used overwhelming force on Yugoslavia and Afghanistan both -- without much condemnation. People understood. But in the case of the Jewish state, the outcry against even moderate defensive measures is prophetically biased against the Jewish state.
I’d suggest that we didn’t use overwhelming force against Iraq, Yugoslavia (I guess, don’t know what we were doing there), and Afghanistan is a work in progress. I say that not based on hardware, but the fact that we didn’t use a level of force adequate to achieve a clearly defined objective, for example in Iraq the removal of Sadaam as a threat. We did drop a lot of bombs, still do.
Clearly there bias against Israel, and opinion can be damaging, but thus far Israel hasn’t taken the steps to end this war, and I agree with van Creveld that the cause lies in a cultural unwillingness to extract that large a toll on an “inferior” enemy.
One thing that many posters gloss over is that, short of, at the end of the process Israel will have a neighbor with a potentially hostile population.
They can be walled off if the borders are defensible.
Or they can be reoccupied and pacified, a long, long process. If you were to read some of Vann’s comments or Gen "Brute" Krulak’s from the early-mid 60's, you’d see the risks of this course of action, and also the solutions. Over a few decades it could work.
BTW, the knife analogy could start with Israel killing terrorists (they know who and where they are) quietly, individually, one or two at a time if necessary, wherever they are, in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, a resort in Cypress, and whenever they can be found as they did with the Munich killers.