Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre
I don’t give Israel anything, I don’t have to, Israel has a mandate from its people to take whatever measures are necessary for their security.
That’s it.
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It’s never as simple as just ‘it’.
Israel has international treaty obligations (shorthand: “international law”) that govern the way it undertakes military operations. As a sovereign democracy it can of course ignore international obligations in preference to the concerns of its citizens, but at the risk of long-term consequences for its wider support and influence in the world.
Their calculation right now appears to be that as Iran and certain unfriendly Arab regimes are backing Palestine and particularly Hamas, they effectively have the Americans over a barrel in terms of public criticism of their actions. Add to that Netanyahu’s desperation to recover from a very serious security failing that has his name all over it and Hamas’s failure to anticipate the scale of the response to their insane rampage and you have a complex, toxic and deadly situation in which a lot of innocent people are dying for the egos of a few very angry men.