Politics: Huh. Wow.

Gideon Levy in the Jerusalem newspaper Haaretz offers an insightful piece on the actions of the Israeli Defense Force in response to the Palestinian uprising. It speaks to the chicken-egg argument that is the uber-metaphor for the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict: When Israel executes a search for a suspected terrorist by blowing up a building and the two adjacent buildings, killing a dozen innocent people (in the case in question, a pregnant mother of eleven and two other children during an attack on the Jabalya refugee camp), are their actions justified? Levy makes the point that the action is conducted under military cover to provide Israelis with the illusion of clean hands, but that there are no clean hands left in the Occupied Territories. An excerpt:

The moment the IDF sends tanks into a densely crowded refugee camp it puts all the inhabitants at risk. The moment the tanks open fire, innocent people are bound to be hurt. Tanks in Jabalya cannot fire shells without killing women and children, just as it was impossible to drop a one-ton bomb on the house of Salah Shehadeh in Gaza without killing 15 civilians, mostly children. Thus, anyone who decides to send tanks into Jabalya is making a decision to kill civilians.

The test of intention - the terrorists intend to kill civilians, whereas the IDF does not - is irrelevant. The Armored Corps soldiers who fired shells in Jabalya may not have intended to kill civilians, but they and their commanders killed civilians. They therefore bear the responsibility for the killing. An operation to kidnap a wanted individual from Hamas in the heart of Jabalya - a "surgical operation" in the spit-and-polish language of the divisional commander, Brigadier General Gadi Shamni - that ends, as could be expected, in a dozen Palestinians killed, most of them civilians, and large-scale destruction, is an act of terrorism.

Read the whole thing. (The piece loads a little slowly, so be patient.)