Enraged Elephant

I remember a line from a Bruce Willis movie, to the effect that military force is a blunt instrument, not a surgical tool. I’m sure that idea wasn’t original with that movie, but that’s where I heard it. And Israel has been especially blunt in applying such force.

It’s clear that Hamas started this round by firing rockets. While these are lethal weapons, their range was limited and they did relatively little harm – I said relatively little. To add a metaphor to the mix, it’s like a wasp stinging an elephant. A single wasp is not capable of causing the elephant much grief, but repeated stinging prompts the elephant to do something about it – and you don’t want to be in the neighborhood when that happens.

The question is, when the enraged elephant starts stomping, do the wasps get killed and does the stinging stop – and what else gets stomped on? I said in an earlier post that if what the Israelis really want is regime change in Gaza, they should go for it and stop pretending they have lesser goals. But have hundreds of deaths really been necessary? Is it good PR to be shooting at schools or U.N. convoys? Was a humanitarian crisis a necessary step to Israel’s security? After all the harm that’s been done, one would hope that the Israelis would be satisfied. But how many new enemies has Israel created?

A blockaded territory like Gaza looks an awful lot like a ghetto, and Israel, of all countries, should know what that means.

There, now I’ve said it.