On Friday Charles Krauthammer wrote a superb article about the conflict in the Gaza strip for the Washington Post, the beggining is particularly telling:
Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.
-- Associated Press, Dec. 27
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis -- 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years -- deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
If France were firing thousands of rockets and mortars, month after month, across the channel at Sussex how would we react? I'd expect we would respond much the same way Israel has. That might be why a spokesman for the Czech EU Presidency has said that they understand Israel's actions as "defensive, not offensive".
42% of the Palestinian population are under 15 years old. Hamas hope that if they keep using the education system and media to radicalise the Palestinian population (supported by our money - PDF) then that huge young generation of Palestinians can be encouraged to fight a slow war of annihilation against Israel. They are relying on international opinion preventing Israel from defending itself due to admirable, but misdirected, anger on behalf of the Palestinian people who suffer when Hamas succeed in getting them bombed. As Krauthammer says: "For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians."
