Never A Good Sign: "My Men Are Brave And Honourable; Their Cause Is Holy"

Kaiser Wilhelm II allowed zeppelins to bomb Liège in Belgium in August, 1914, right at the beginning of WW I and soon the zeppelins were dropping bombs on Paris as well, even damaging Notre Dame Cathedral. Willy was ok with bombing English military installations and docks but forbade targeting London in the fear that a bomb might hoot one of his royal relatives but by 1915 he was already being ignored by the military and they began a terror bombing of London. Watch the video from documentary sources above. In all, Britain suffered 1,413 civilian deaths and 3,409 injuries from the first aerial terror bombing of civilians. It was far from the last.

Although the Germany master plan-- "to break an enemy's morale by deliberately targeting civilians"-- failed, it was a clear demonstration of "how all future wars would be fought." Their brutal doctrine, "that modern warfare is total warfare, has resonated ever since."

If it looks like Ken and I have avoided talking about the Gaza War, that's because we pretty much have, although not because we talked about avoiding it. A couple weeks ago I watched a documentary about WW I zeppelins on the History Channel similar to the one above and it made me want to write about the Gaza War but, other than on Twitter, I never got to it.

I have good friends on both sides of this contest and none of them could possibly be happy without a complete acceptance of their perspective-- like that German zeppelin leader who said God was on their side.The first I ever heard of this problem was when, as a child, I learned the Jews claimed "God" told them to exterminate the Canaanites (pre-Muslim Palestinians) so they could take the land of Israel for themselves. At one time there was a bounty on Gazan (Philistine) severed penises.

Encouraged by a new foreign policy perspective in America that no longer has all sides rally behind the president, the Israeli right appears to want to exterminate the Palestinians or, at least, make them all move away somewhere. Gaza first.

Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has published a plan for the total destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

His detailed plan, which calls for the use of concentration camps, amounts to direct and public incitement to genocide-- a punishable crime under the Genocide Convention.

In a 1 August posting on his Facebook page, Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, calls for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”

“This is our country-- our country exclusively,” he writes, “including Gaza.”

…Feiglin writes that the Israeli army must “designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.”

“Tent encampments,” where the Palestinian civilian population would be “concentrated,” are simply concentration camps.

“The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected,” he adds.

He then calls for the “formerly populated areas” to be “shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.”

The Israeli army would then “exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.”

Do Israeli civilians have a right to not be bombarded by Hamas rockets in their own homes? You bet they do. But extermination of the Palestinian people isn't a tenable or realistic solution. And Gazans have a right not to be forced to live in a blockaded ghetto in their own homeland. We've come a long way since the Bronze Age writing that gave the Jews all the land "from the desert in the south to the Lebanon Mountains in the north; from the great Euphrates River in the east, through the Hittite country, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west." Roughly, that would be not just the present Israel and Palestine, but also Jordan and most of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. And there's been a lot of water under the bridge since their Bronze Age god supposedly "ordered" the Jews to destroy with the sword every living thing in it-- men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys."

That's not allowed anymore. People who want to do that are sociopaths and war criminals. Here's how today's primitive evangelical lunatics justify all this. These people don't think they're reading a fairy tale; to them it's a game-plan:

First, the Promised Land belonged to God before the Canaanites established temporary residency there. It had always been his plan to give this land to the descendants of Abraham: "In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here" (Gen 15:16a). The Lord did not take from the Canaanites that which was "theirs"-- he reclaimed that which was his according to his foreordained purposes.

Second, the Canaanites lived in wicked rebellion against the will and purposes of God. The Lord had predicted that Abraham's descendants would claim the land when "the sin of the Amorites" reached its "full measure" (Gen 15:16b). This "full measure" of sin was attained by the Canaanites in the generation leading to the Jewish conquest.

Moses warned his people about these sins they would encounter upon entering the Promised Land: "Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead" (Deut 18:10-11).  He stated that anyone who practices such sins is "detestable to the Lord," and explained that "because of these detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you" (v. 12).  Those who were conquered by Joshua and his armies were not innocent victims, but wicked sinners who received the judgment their transgressions had warranted.

Third, the blood retribution practiced by ancient tribal culture required the Jewish armies to destroy not only the soldiers of their enemies, but their families as well. So long as one member of a family remained, that person was bound by cultural law to attempt retribution against the enemies of his people. Such unrest and hostility would have persisted throughout the nation's history, with no possibility of peace in the land. What appears to be genocide was actually the way wars were typically prosecuted.

…God does not change. But his purposes are fulfilled in different ways at different times in redemptive history. Justice required retribution against the sinful Canaanite civilization. And his salvation plan required a purified nation through whom he could bring the Messiah of all mankind. When Christ came, Joshua's leadership of conflict and conquest was fulfilled.

Now we are taught to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors (Mt 5:44). Not because God has changed, for such love proves that we are "sons of your Father in heaven" (v. 45). Rather, because such love expresses his grace toward us and all mankind.

Was it fair that Israel destroyed the residents of Canaan? If God were fair, none of us could see his perfect heaven. We are all spiritual Canaanites, saved from eternal wrath only by the love of our Creator. Think back to your last sin. Admit that this one transgression warrants the judgment and condemnation of a holy God. And thank God that he is not fair.

There you go! Almost half a million Gazans have been displaced so far and far more have been killed than the German zeppelin terror bombing of London 99 years ago. Amnesty International: "Israeli forces have carried out attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians, including through the use of precision weaponry such as drone-fired missiles, and attacks using munitions such as artillery, which cannot be precisely targeted, on very densely populated residential areas, such as Shuja’iyyeh. They have also directly attacked civilian objects."

An Israeli perspective reads very differently:

[I]t has been clear since the days before this conflict began that Netanyahu has not wanted to launch a full-scale war against Hamas. He repeatedly offered “quiet for quiet” when the rocket fire first escalated, immediately accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal two weeks ago, agreed to a series of “humanitarian time-outs” which were then breached by Hamas over recent days, and waved away what he called the “background noise” from those, like Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who have been loudly urging him to smash Hamas and deriding him for his hesitancy.

Nobody can imagine for a moment that Netanyahu does not consider Hamas the embodiment of Islamic extremist evil. Nobody can doubt that he takes seriously Hamas’s declared goal of destroying Israel. Netanyahu does not believe for a second that Hamas can be reformed. Netanyahu does not believe any conceivable post-conflict framework could achieve the demilitarization of Gaza if Hamas remains largely intact. He knows all too well how Hamas has strengthened its capacity to do Israel harm over the seven years since it seized control of Gaza, and that it will only strengthen further if it is able to do so after this conflict. It was he who warned that the tunnels would have been used to “catastrophic” effect against the residents of Gaza-adjacent communities had they not been tackled now. It was he on Monday night who declared it untenable for Israelis to be faced with the threat of “death from above” by rocket fire and “death from below” via the terror tunnels.

So why, from a prime minister clear-eyed about the danger Hamas poses to Israel, and urged by his right-wing base to approve more intensive military action, this manifest disinclination to send the IDF "all the way?"

One possible explanation: He believes that for all Hamas’s swaggering, it is in real trouble-- not militarily, where its key capacity has not been significantly harmed, but in terms of its credibility in Gaza and thus its likely standing when the guns fall silent. That Gazans loathe Israel is a given. But might they also increasingly loathe Hamas for bringing Israel’s military force down upon them? And might a weakened Hamas be forced to accept the return of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to Gaza, with the possibility of the “sustained calm” for Israel that Netanyahu set as his opening objective for this conflict?

There are other considerations, namely, 1-how many IDF deaths Israel can absorb without mass hysteria, 2- the prospect of Israel having to occupy Gaza again, and 3- how Israel's other Muslim neighbors (and Iran) will eventual react to the slaughter of their co-religionists. But that part about teaching someone a lesson and the Gazans rebelling against Hamas? How silly is that? When's the last time someone used brutal deadly force to "teach someone a lesson" that the lesson they learned was the particular one being taught? It didn't work in London in 1915. And, speaking of lessons, when do governments-- or the people who elect them-- ever learn the fallacy of "precision" bombing not hurting civilians?