United States must start condemning some Israeli actions

We of all people collectively understand the need to defend our homeland against terrorist attacks. Not one person would suggest that Israel has a right to defend itself. However, the ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza is just unacceptable, and is most certainly going to achieve a quite opposite outcome from preventing terrorist attacks.

Civilian casualties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are nothing new, however the frequency and magnitude of the loss of life during these past weeks has been overwhelming. There is really not a more defining moment of this Israeli campaign than what happened early this morning in Gaza, when Israeli tanks shelled a UN-run school, killing 2 young Palestinian boys and wounding 14 others. The boys were 5 and 7 years old. This school had been acting as a shelter, harboring 1,600 civilians seeking refuge from the bombardment. A UN spokesman said that the Israeli army would have known their exact GPS coordinates and that there were people taking shelter there. This might be explained as a horrible accident, except that it is the 3rd UN shelter that IDF forces have hit in the past 22 days. According to UN medical sources, over 1,200 Palestinians, 400 of them children, have died since the bombing began 22 days ago.

This indicates that Israel is not engaging in just counter-terrorism, but terrorism itself. This campaign has not been to simply destroy Hamas targets, but to terrorize the population, hoping that they are so devastated by the innocent loss of life that they will be too terrified to fight against the Israeli state. A senior Israeli official almost said as much when he told CNN that "Hamas' military machine has been substantially destroyed. They have been given a sufficient deterrence that they will think twice before attacking again." In other words, they will remember how many children died the last time they shot rockets at Israel.

This is such an illogical assumption it is astounding. It seems that Israel is making the assumption that terrorists will somehow be deterred by human loss of life. This is what they WANT. Hamas has triggered such an enormous overreaction from Israel, that the only thing the IDF has accomplished is to create more hatred and resent towards the state. Palestinians aren't going to remember that Hamas triggered this, they're going to remember Israeli tanks shelling schools and killing hundreds of children. The children who witnessed the killing of their friends and families by Israeli forces are going to grow up with a deep-seeded hatred of the state of Israel, and in all likelihood they will be much more likely to engage in terrorist attacks.

Why must the United States start condemning these actions? Because remaining silent and sitting idly by while Israel commits these atrocities is putting our de facto seal of approval on the actions, and the whole world sees that. We cannot on one hand claim to be engaged in a war on terror, and then on the other passively support it. To do so is outrageously hypocritical and only further increases the negative perception of our nation in Middle Eastern states where we are trying to implement freedom and democracy. These people want no part of a Western society that approves of the killing of innocent children.

Simply making a statement against the brutal tactics being used by Israel would go very far in saving the reputation of the United States abroad, and may even force Israel to reconsider their method of "combating terrorism." To take that a necessary step further, we could stop supplying the money and weapons that are used in IDF campaigns such as this one, but that is a post for another time.