Israeli Writer: This War is Child's Play in More Ways Than One

My thoughts:

a. Pick on someone your own size, Israel!

b. We mistake this for a 'war'.  It's not.  It's Jenin writ large.  It's the Israeli style police action where they go in and destroy everything for the slights they have suffered and imagined currently, in the past, and in the future.

 Gideon Levy at Haaretz "The IDF has no mercy for the children in Gaza nursery schools "

Excerpts:

No pilot or soldier went to war to kill children. Not one among them intended to kill children, but it also seems neither did they intend not to kill them. They went to war after the IDF had already killed 952 Palestinian children and adolescents since May 2000. 

That reminds me  of the IDF soldier who asked in the film while sitting on a Palestinian couch after breaking in, on orders, to a Palestinian home and terrifying the family (also on orders)  "What is a good Jewish boy doing here?". That the incident happened in Jenin as I remember (unless the clip was saved from an even earlier 'conflict') not Gaza (as the recent video claims) makes no difference. 

That is the question.  

What are you doing, Israel?  You are becoming the fascists that persecuted your own people, your fathers, mothers, and grandparents.

 More Gideon Levy:

A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas. They were killed because the IDF bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings. That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas' hands, and we will never be able to escape that responsibility.

The children of Gaza who survive this war will remember it. It is enough to watch Nazareth-born Juliano Mer Khamis' wonderful movie "Arna's Children" to understand what thrives amid the blood and ruin we are leaving behind. The film shows the children of Jenin - who have seen less horror than those of Gaza - growing up to be fighters and suicide bombers.

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Compared with previous wars, it is child's play - pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition. A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight. All this must be said openly, before we begin exulting in our heroism and victory.

This war is also child's play because of its victims. About a third of those killed in Gaza have been children - 311, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 270 according to the B'Tselem human rights group - out of the 1,000 total killed as of Wednesday. Around 1,550 of the 4,500 wounded have also been children according to figures from the UN, which says the number of children killed has tripled since the ground operation began. 

tags: israel  gaza  children  children in danger  hamas  war  

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