The news today is that Israel fired missiles into Gaza to kill Mubarak al-Hassanat, a top-ranking Hamas member directly involved with firing Hamas' homemade Kassan rockets into southern Israel. Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years. I went to Israel on Oct. 15 and returned Oct. 24. On Oct. 22, I visited the town of Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) and nearby Ashkelon. Sederot is a little more than a kilometer from Gaza:
That's me standing on the southern edge of Sederot. Gaza is only a few hundred meters on the other side of the tree line behind me. Six rockets fell on Sederot a few hours before we arrived. Here are the remains of three of them.
There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside the town's police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.
These are purely anti-personnel rockets. They lack the explosive power to penetrate reinforced buildings. The warhead section is loaded with pellets or small ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh, propelled by only a couple of pounds of high explosive. However, if they do hit an ordinary building (as a rocket did yesterday) they can damage it substantially:
Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimeter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.
The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. Whern a launch is detected, every speaker in the town - and there are a lot of warning speakers - announces "red dawn" over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter. The town continues to build shelters such as this one.
On Oct. 22, I took a video of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched. People in Sederot and surrounding areas have died from these attacks, including children.
Stay safe from those rockets, Rev.
Rev - Exactly why we must support Israel. The goons in Gaza, first Fatah, now Hamas have been doing this for YEARS! And Israel has been remarkably restrained in the responses they choose to take.
Need to think about arming those blimps.
Collective punishment again?
That's worked so well in the past.
And Israel has been remarkably restrained in the responses they choose to take.
I fully support Israel's right to defend it's people and it's borders.
Restrained in their responses is not exactly the words I would use.
I hope their attempts to shut off the electricity leads somewhere - anyone know if they have done it before?
And while we're on the topic - whatever happened to that trench between Egypt and Gaza?
Real question is- why is Israel supplying electricity and services to the territories period? Pull back to the green line or the closest equivalent, build the fence, cut off all ties, and if a rocket comes over the border blast a square block in response to the attack by a soverieng neighbor. All this interconnectedness is fundamentally unhelpful, and the Israelis do quite a bit to perpetuate it.
Why not collective punishment Alphie? What in the heck would be wrong with punishing the people who are making war on you?
Oh I forgot. It's JEWS doing it. Therefore, they should be erased from existence.
If anything Israel has not demonstrated clear consequences for this action, which is why they get more of it. The Israeli politicos act as if they are dealing with people like them. Suburban, middle class, averse to violence.
Instead the Palestinian people live and breathe personal, unremitting violence and cruelty. The people value things completely at odds with Israelis: polygamy instead of monogamy, "Big Men" instead of cooperative beta males, rights of women versus complete oppression, and so on.
Palestinians are certainly human beings, but so too were the Witch burners of the 1300's, or say the cannibals of New Guinea. Neither have much in common with middle class westerners.
Israel's policy is poorly formulated to appeal to violent, "Big Men" who resemble nothing more than a pride of lions or say, Idi Amin. Killing a big man is nothing, heck his own subordinates plot to kill him every day, so they can be big men in their stead. And their subordinates plot to kill them.
Nor will "targeted" action or restraint or even cutting off electricity and other infrastructure do much good (though it would be a minimum start). Instead the pain must be MASSIVE, in order to break through the big man dynamic. To save it's own people's lives, Israel must be prepared to fight a fundamentally non-Western enemy in non-Western ways. As long as prospective Big Men feel they can achieve power through rocketing Israel the rockets will continue to rain on Israel. When prospective Big Men feel they will LOSE power by rocketing Israel the rockets will cease to fall.
This will require killing A LOT of people. Inevitably a lot of innocents but that is the reality of the situation. Israel's big mistake, one Americans make also, is that they are fighting people like them. When fundamentally they are not.
EVEN the Israeli President is not above the law. And no Israeli man can simply adduct another's wife or property without consequences. Not so in Palestinian lands.
Alphie, collective punishment has historically worked extremely well. But I don't see this that way.
Israel has no obligation to supply services to people trying to kill them. If the Palestinians don't like that, perhaps they can elect non-genocidal leaders - or get some power plants built with all that international aid, instead of rockets to kill Jews and provoke responses like these.
The Palestinians have chosen war. The shame is not that they have reaped consequences from this choice, but that they have reaped so few.
Good shooting with the missiles, Israel. Take down the hubs...
Well, the alleged government of the Palestinian Klepto-Kakistocracy complained that it would make thousands of people homeless and be "a catastrophe and disaster for the Palestinian people", and our extra-good friends the Egyptians employed similar redundant phrases, and Israel backed down.
The Kassam rockets themselves are mostly manufactured in Gaza, anyway, and are as crude as zip guns. That doesn't detract from the danger they pose, of course - Timothy McVeigh's nitrogen fertilizer bomb was crude, too.
These rockets often misfire and hit on the Palestinian side. That's actually a bonus, because then they can claim the Israelis bombed somebody's house for no damn reason.
Kind of the same way that Palestinian children get frequent head injuries from the numbnuts who go around shooting their AK-47s in the air, oblivious to the fact that a high-trajectory 7.62 bullet can come back to earth with enough force to penetrate somebody's skull. When that happens they call it an Israeli sniper.
Joe,
I believe the Palestinians own a rather large natural gas deposit off the coast of Gaza that's being developed.
alphie at #10
I believe the Palestinians own a rather large natural gas deposit off the coast of Gaza that's being developed.
Own a rather large target. large target...
And negotiations are underway to sell this back to Israel . Which is just... I don't know, I don't think it's irony, instead I'll call it amusing.
Strange though - you would think an impoverished people would love power plants and industry (even if they would be yet another target) from a cheap native source, rather than easily movable cash.
Which Palestinians own that gas? Hamas or Fatah?
Hamas will not agree to any deal that involves sharing it with Fatah. That was one of the first things they announced after they got done shooting all the Fatah people in Gaza through the head. And any deal that excludes them will be met with terrorism, against Brit, Jew, and non-Hamas Palestinian alike.
I wonder how soon the revenues from that natural gas will be enriching the lives of ordinary Palestinians? With their luck, it'll be the day before the sun burns out.
Nice try though, alphie. Keep those positive thoughts coming.
@ Rockford #7 and Katzman #8, so if the Turks move across the Iraqi border and lay waste to Kurdish villages, etc you're OK with that as well; applying the same principle to the PKK and Kurdish people more generally?
I'm OK with it. I'm just checking to make sure you guys are both consistent. We wouldn't want any Jewish exceptionalism or anything. That would be the sort of thing that helps makes the case for Al Qaeda, you know.
Alphie, collective punishment has historically worked extremely well. But I don't see this that way.
Sure. What would really work, is the israelis wait for a rocket attack across the border, and then they kill half the people in gaza. And then if there's a second attack, they kill half the ones who're left. And then if there's a third attack they kill half the survivors. Eventually the palestinians would get the idea.
And there's really nothing to keepn them from doing that except US and israeli public opinion.
When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that the palestinians haven't completely given up by now. They're just exactly like Cubs fans.
Unless you actually go to Israel and travel around the country, it is difficult to comprehend how small the country is and how close those who threaten her existence are.
We spent a couple of weeks in Israel last summer, celebrating our older daughter's Bat Mitzvah. Stood atop the Golan Heights and could see Damascus in the distance, a mere 30 miles away. Spent an afternoon in Zfat, which was bombed by Hizbollah a mere 15 days after we returned home. A week in Jerusalem where we spent days touring within the old city which is itself somewhat divided, even though it is under Israeli control. Two days in Eilat which has border with both Jordan and Egypt and is a mere 5 miles north of Saudi Arabia (across the Red Sea).
It is a tough neighborhood, made tougher by the fact that, as Joe Katzman points out, the Palestinians elect leaders whose aim is to perpetuate the conflict rather than resolve it. Their leaders don't want a two state solution, they want a one state solution.
Thanks for the report, Rev.
DrDave (#15) - thanks. We also went to the Lebanese border near where Hezbollah killed six IDF soldiers last summer and kidnapped two, which was the trigger event for Israel warring against Lebanon then. I blogged a lot about that war on this site.
As i assemble photos and notes, I'll post them here and at my own blog, DonaldSensing.com.
The very word, punishment, has a parachial connotation to it. Collective punishment only really applies to a group that you have authority over. If you shoot up a village you are occupying, thats collective punishment. If, on the other hand, a soveriegn neighbor allows weapons to be fired across a border, well thats what we call war.
The PKK issue is interesting in this regard. I may be in the minority, but i believe Turkey has the right to go after these camps. We may ask them not to in the interests of regional stability, but morally they are perfectly entitled.
Iraq does have a responsibility to prevent armed excursions from Iraqi soil, and the Kurds have the capability of making that a reality.
Ironically, and from a very Machiavellian pov, if the Turks invade it may actually bind the Iraqis closer together. It would be nice to see a multi-ethnic Iraq army securing its northern border (hell, any of Iraqs borders) and with this threat that actually seems like a reasonable possibility (if the Kurds allow it).
parachial? Parochial.
There are differences re the PKK. For one thing the Iraqi government seems AFAIK to recognize the legitimacy of Turkey and have taken steps against the PKK. But whether it is a lack of will or capability, the PKK persists in launching terrorist attacks on Turkey, so I think Turkey is justified in raiding the Qandil Mountain sanctuary.
Glen Wishard,
Not that I approve of the practice of shooting off rounds into the air, but if the incidence of head injuries from the same is "frequent", perhaps you have a link or two to some accounts?
Oh, and fwiw a high-trajectory bullet is the least likely to cause harm, as it will be traveling only at terminal velocity limited by wind resistance, which for any average-size bullet isn't all that fast. Rounds fired at a shallow trajectory, that retain a fair amount of their initial (propelled) velocity, are much more dangerous.
"Oh, and fwiw a high-trajectory bullet is the least likely to cause harm, as it will be traveling only at terminal velocity limited by wind resistance, which for any average-size bullet isn't all that fast."
That's only if the bullet is travelling straight up into the air, flips over, and tumbles back down. If there is any sort of angle (which is likely) the bullet will travel in a standard parabolic trajectory and can enter a victim at ballistic velocity.
Kirk -
No, I have never read a news report that says "Hamas gunmen accidentally shoot child during 'wedding celebration'". Nor do I expect to do so anytime soon.
Instead, you see lots of stories like this one.The logic is simple and never questioned: A dead Palestinian child with a bullet wound to the head = Israeli sniper, QED.
If you fire an AK-47 straight up into the air, every round from that burst will come back to earth with a terminal velocity of around 300 fps. That's only 1/8 of the muzzle velocity of an AK-47, but it will still have enough energy to penetrate the skull of a child. That's from a bullet that goes straight up and retains none of the muzzle velocity. A bullet fired at a high angle will retain a portion of the muzzle velocity, as well.
Apparently Israeli snipers are such phenomenal shots that they can even hit people in New York and Los Angeles.
"That's only 1/8 of the muzzle velocity of an AK-47, but it will still have enough energy to penetrate the skull of a child"
Whether a tumbling bullet would penetrate is questionable but it is easilly enough for it to fracture a skull, certainly a childs.
A 150 grain bullet falling at 300 ft/s has a kinetic energy of about 70 footpounds, which is about the force required to fracture a bone (thats about equivalent to a 75 mph fastball).
Penetration is less like, the sectional density of a rifle bullet on its side is quite low (~.07 psi?) so its probably going to bounce off the skull, particularly since both the skull and the bullet are oblong.
Essentially its like getting hit in the head with a baseball. It could definately kill a kid.
The example Glenn quotes, the bullet went in above one ear and came out hard above the other ear. That doesn't sound like a random bullet falling from on high.
But it doesn't say who did it. It didn't have to be an israeli sniper just because the eyewitnesses said it was. It could have been any old garden-variety palestinian sniper who just wanted to kill some palestinian at random.It could have been anybody who had an adequate rifle. You can't believe palestinians when they say israelis are killing them, they'll kill each other just so they can blame it on israelis. They're so devious, they'll do airstrikes on their own cities so they can blame it on israel.
J. Thomas:
You didn't remind us of the Israeli spy who dressed
up like a dead Palestinian so he could fall off a
stretcher while being filmed to make those truthful Palestinians look like liars.
And those Israeli women who dressed up like Palestinian mothers to pass out candy on 9/11/2001 to make it look like Palestinians were celebrating the deaths of thousands of Americans. It was easy for the Israeli women to do that because, after all, the 19 hijackers were really Israelis pretending to be Arabs, right?
And you forgot to mention those wily Israelis posing as Hamas and pushing Fatah security men out of the windows.
I'm surprised you didn't note that the latest estimate is over 550 Palestinians murdered this year by Israelis pretending to be other Palestinians, just to make the Palestinians look blood thirsty.
Because we all KNOW that Arabs would never, ever attack other Arabs.
I'm sure you show us proof that Saddam Hussein was really an Israeli General who used Israeli soldiers dressed up like Iraqi military to invade Kuwait back in 1990.
J Thomas
You can't believe palestinians when they say israelis are killing them, they'll kill each other just so they can blame it on israelis. They're so devious, they'll do airstrikes on their own cities so they can blame it on israel.
This isn't a racial thing, there are sociopaths in every culture. I'll throw in a religion hat and say it's more common with fanatical believers, and an income hat to say it's more likely among the downtrodden.
The always trustworthy anonymous commenter
Just because someone doesn't agree with portions of Israel's policies or has their own ideas is no reason to lump in every crazy anti-Israel idea out on the net.
Sounds like the Israeli mind control satellite has gotten to you.