Hamas: We have one of your soldiers as our hostage. We have a list of 2,000 Palestinians we want for him in trade.

Israel: We have more than 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and we will be executing them once they are found guilty of the charges of aiding and abetting in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, the killing of Israeli civilians, and the assassination of Israeli children by terrorist organizations. We thank you for providing us their names in your demands that we free them. They helped make the case in their military tribunal, along with the other evidence against them.

Hamas: No, this is illegal under international law. You are taking retribution against innocent Palestinians. We will show you the cost of that. Here is our hostage’s finger.

Israel: Well, to react with the appropriate proportionate response, we are forced to send you 100 Palestinian heads for this trade of our soldier’s finger. Now if you wish to send something more substantial, Israel is sure to hold to the correct proportionate response.

You try to destroy us, we destroy you!

But let’s be realistic in this day and age. The idea that Israel can just blot out Hamas and help set up an actual government in Gaza that has some pretense in really, you know, actually governing rather than enjoying gang warfare is simply naive. But one can hope.

Could condition relocating the next shipload by the number of mortars, rockets, kidnapping and suicide attempts (i.e. every day Israel is attacked another ship is loaded and leaves).

In 50 years, we’ll have a repeat of the suits and settlements seen in the Japanese internment camps (as if there was something else that could have been done) but the current issue will be long behind us.

Here’s the Right Wing News guest blogger line-up this week-end. Saturday ——– Bookworm from Bookworm Room Cassy Fiano Kathy Shaidle Five Feet Of Fury Morgan from House of Eratosthenes Gina Cobb John Stephenson from Stop The ACLU Little Miss Attila…

Occupations are normally expected to safeguard civilians and to protect the infrastructure. Insurgents are normally expected to resist the occupation. Hamas, however, is a terrorist organization using insurgency methods but at the same time is also a government: a standing and sitting power over a well demarcated territory.

It means all forces involved in warfare between two political entities are game. That includes civilians if they take up arms or participates in the war effort. So long as it is ultimately the military capability of the enemy you are targeting, you can kill as many civilians as you want, so long as you have shown some efforts to avoid them.

This is what the laws of war demand, even though such laws are no longer enforced. The laws of war are there not to prevent war or to hobble one side as opposed to another, but to reduce the gross unnecessary deaths of civilians in war time and to provide a proper framework for POWs and other specialty areas.

If the Japanese keep rebuilding their war time industry because of their cottage workers, then eventually those cottage workers become a more optimal military target than the actual buildings in which they worked. If you take more casualties when doing daytime bombing rather than nighttime bombing, but your bomb accuracy is better daytime rather than nighttime, then you are justified in killing civilians at night rather than conduct operations in the day due to military expedience: the expedience of losing less bombers at night than in the day. But that is not the spirit in which current laws of warfare are being followed or enforced or talked about.

Here we have loopholes in the way the law is used but no real effort to close those loopholes. We have HAMAS taking advantage of red cross symbols, hospitals, schools, and religious places to stash their weapons. The Israelis, in the meantime, do nothing but help Hamas put more civilians in danger. Just like when Israel traded a thousand Palestinians for the dead body of one or two Israelis, they taught the terrorists what worked and what didn’t worked. And what worked was killing civilians, taking hostages, and not playing by the rules. Every time Israel warns the targets in advance of what is happening, Israel kills more of their own children.

Israel’s actions aren’t righteous at all. They try to be, but their level of unbalanced extremity is too much. Hamas is unbalanced on the extreme in one direction while Israel is unbalanced in the other direction. Hamas is to not solicitous of civilian casualties enough while Israel is too solicitous of civilian casualties. Both do not follow the original spirit behind the laws of warfare. The more Israel tries to defend civilians, the more Israel makes civilians a valuable target and weapon in the war. The more Hamas uses civilians as weapons, the less protections those civilians will have from warfare.

Of course, the real villain of the piece here is the international community that is selling munitions to both sides hoping to get as high a body count as physically possible. They want a solution for “both sides” because so long as they offer this illusion, they like to think the cycle of violence will keep on going. On sure, they talk about negotiations ending the cycle of violence, but only an idiot would believe that after decades of reality wherein negotiations did nothing but sustain the cycle of violence.

I’m meaner than Alan, though – and certainly meaner than Israel. I hold off on the bombing while the ladies and babies go running in there, wait until the place is packed with them, the more the merrier – then put one right down the chimney. Perfectly happy to kill future terrorists and those who nurture them. Would not lose a second of sleep.

I wouldn’t have held my fire and would have told the world exactly why, (and not cared much about their response, either), and made of it an example for all time: “Palestinian mommas, dumb-asses that you are: this is what’s going to happen every time. Little Ding Al-Dong goes poof, and so do you, so you can’t make any more of him.”

The only way to long-term defeat this stuff is get the people unallied with the terrorists, and allied with you. We managed to do this in Anbar Province in Iraq, and Al Quaeda found itself without friends – and defeated. The people themselves rendered them untenable. When you make the cost of being allied with the terrorists too high; or the reward for not being allied with the terrorists high enough (in Iraq we made the rewards high enough – but we could have made the costs high enough just as easily – and cheaper), then the terrorists will have no friends, and will have to quit.

If Israel would just accept that Hamas is going to give them a steady diet of women and children as targets, deal with it, and damn well use them as targets, it would only have to happen a couple of times. Dumb as they are, eventually even the Palestinian people will get the object of the lesson and call a halt to this, and once Hamas – like any other terrorist organization – loses the people, then they’re done.

Just as we had to demonstrate to both Germany and Japan that yeah: if you make it necessary we will indeed kill Grandma and the grand-kiddies – and the dog and the cat and the tweety-bird too; so Israel needs to demonstrate the same williingness. And the hell with “world opinion,” whatever that may be.