The Orphans' Picnic

When I was little, we used to have a joke in our family about "Mummy, can I shoot you so that I can go to the orphans' picnic?"

It seems that the Israeli Defence Force has a similar disconnected approach to morality. Just let me get this right. They are going to stop bombing people in Gaza for three hours a day so that they can distribute aid and medical supplies, then three hours later they are going to start bombing again?

What fucking planet are these people on?

Also I would like to know what the rules of engagement are for the IDF when it comes to shooting at schools. It's a fairly devastating question, because either way, if they have been given the coordinates of the school and told NOT to fire at it, then they are in breach of their own rules of engagement, and if their rules of engagement allow them to shoot at schools, then presumably that implies the deliberate disregard of civilians and - is that not against the Geneva convention?

Back briefly to the issue of proportionality.

What is Israel hoping to achieve? Unless they occupy every square foot of Gaza, which they just don't have the military wherewithal to do, there will always be some neglected back lot somewhere where the jihadists will appear as if by magic, set up their rockets, and then shoot and scoot. There's also the issue of the relative totals of casualty figures. I know that war is not a game of cricket, and that in a sense, the five Israeli dead are just as 100% dead as each of the supposed 500 Palestinians is.

But these rocket attacks that are being advanced as the primary casus belli in this case. According to figures published by its own central bureau of statistics, road accident deaths in Israel 2000-2006 averaged at 7.1 people per 100,000. Given a population of 7.73 million, I make that 523 people. Just over 87 per year. According to stats published by The Israel Project, in the period June 2004 to December 2008, 17 Israeli citizens were killed by Qassam Rockets and Mortars fired into Israel by Hamas from Gaza.

Now, like I said, I freely accept that every one of those 17 innocent people is 100% dead and probably leaves grieving families. None of them deserved to die, probably, but the thing is, one of the things governments should do is look at the bigger picture. If Israel is concerned about the threat of the deaths of its citizens, on the face of it, they should be bombing their own ministry of transport this morning.

Which is what leads me to conclude that Israel knows as well as I do that there is no military solution to prevent the rocketing from Gaza, and no justification for the massively disproportionate response apart from to make certain members of the Israeli cabinet look good at election time. Plus, they are handing a massive propaganda victory to Hamas and their cohorts.

To the outside world, it looks like "collective punishment" rather than a military campaign. And every shot they fire, every Palestinian they kill, is creating another vendetta, another family who will be exploited by the loopy fundamentalist twisters of Islam, another kid who will end up wearing a suicide bomber's vest.

I do know, also, that there are decent, humane people in Israel who want the peaceful, two-state solution that seems to me to offer the only glimmer of hope in the whole sorry mess, and I do acknowledge that their voices get drowned out in the brash pronouncements of the likes of the IDF.

I don't deny Israel's right to exist, you can't wind time back to 1948, you have to start from where you are now. Which implies a two-state solution.