Hey, if I'd known you were on the verge of another Gaza post I'd have waited and been on-topic!

Glenn Kessler truly takes the cake here, simultaneously yawning about the David Rose story as a rehash of his own reporting (!) but also maintaining that it doesn't prove that a U.S. policy of arming Dahlan's death squads provoked the battle that Hamas won.

I'm not sophisticated enough for this business of following the Official Line, clearly.

If I keep reading Kessler I'm going to start hallucinating. Mmmm, love the smell of Orwellian bullshvt in the morning:

Rice is traveling in the region, trying to stem the fallout from the constant rocket attacks launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza

That "fallout" would be the IDF assaults on Gaza that have killed in the last month alone many times the number of Palestinians as Israelis killed and wounded by rocket attacks in the last four years.

Both are crimes, but the wildly disproportionate Israeli response -- announced by Israeli policymakers years ago and articulated by serving officials there today -- is turning the stomachs of all but the most hardened. Hence the need for reporters like Kessler to sanitize it with language like 'fallout'. His readers are paying the bill for this, after all; nothing good can come of reminding them that what it is, is slaughter.

Slaughter is justified in the Torah, though:

According to this ruling, the Torah permits the shelling and bombing of Palestinian rocket sources even if there are civilians living there.... This ruling also says that if the Palestinian civilians are concerned about their lives, they should stop the Palestinian resistance from firing rockets on Israeli settlements.

And by the U.S. Congress by a vote of 401-1:

Those responsible for launching rocket attacks against Israel routinely embed their production facilities and launch sites amongst the Palestinian civilian population, utilizing them as human shields. ... The inadvertent inflicting of civilian casualties as a result of defensive military operations aimed at military targets...while deeply regrettable, is not at all morally equivalent to the deliberate targeting of civilian populations as practiced by Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups.

ELECTIONEERING AT IT'S FINEST, both on this side and that side of the pond.

Is it fair to call it inadvertent when you just don't give a shit?

Guess it's time to pull out this old favorite of mine, especially given the topic:
_______________________________________

"The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy," said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, "the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism."

"The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer."

"They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it," he said.

Aid to Hamas may have looked clever, "but it was hardly designed to help smooth the waters," he said. "An operation like that gives weight to President George Bush's remark about there being a crisis in education."

Thanks for that link, Mr. Caruso. I'd forgotten about that report.

Here's the ultimate in what they'll no doubt characterize as a "preventive defensive military operation": [via Badger]

The Israeli Council of Ministers has green-lighted planning for

the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, namely from the region that the resistance uses for the launch of these [Qassam] rockets, and to move them toward Gaza City and to confine them there.

[If] the plan becomes operational, it would start immediately: In the first stage there would be a drop of leaflets advising residents to leave their homes, in addition to special radio announcements in Arabic directed to the residents, and in the event residents didn't obey the warnings, the occupation army would begin bombing the inhabited areas, in order to compel them to leave their homes and go to Gaza City.

This was reported last Wednesday on Israeli Channel 2, sourced to "high-level security sources". Barak is seeking legal clearance to proceed, so this is for the moment very much more in the nature of a threat than an imminent event. Still...

Note: the Council of Ministers meeting was before the killings of students at the right-wing yeshiva in Jerusalem.