Web Letters: Gaza Notebook

By Fawaz A. Gerges

January 16, 2009

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One piece of evidence that Israel's main target has not been Hamas but rather the Gazan population is the extremely low casualty rate suffered by Israeli troops. If Israeli reports can be believed, the IDF death rate from combat is in the single digits. This suggests very conservative battlefield tactics; i.e., heavy aircraft and artillery firepower in lieu of close combat by infantry. It seems to me that Israeli strategy has been to acknowledge the impossibility of destroying a Hamas fighting force of perhaps 15-20,000 and concentrating on what they accomplished in the 2006 Lebanon war: obliterating infrastructure and population centers and deliberately causing high civilian casualties.

David W. Deitch

Lyon, France
01/18/2009 @ 2:52pm
Israel has some of the best "Arabists" in the world, and they are in the best position to know the consequences of the atrocities committed in Gaza. The results the author describes in this article are the real goals of a cold-blooded murderous campaign designed to increase the polarization between the West and the Arab/Muslim world. In alienating the Arab public opinion against the West and against their own moderate regimes, Israel is exploiting the last days of the current moronic US administration to enforce and then entrench the "clash of civilizations" fallacy that its agents and proponents started in the Western academic circles in the early 1990. The massacres of children and civilians in Gaza in the plain view of the Arab masses are serving Israel to polarize the Arabs further away from the West and to guarantee the West as the strategic military and economic depth of Israel for generations to come. In the end, the entire Arab and Muslim world will have to endure great suffering in order for the Zionists of Israel to achieve their dreams of the purity of the Jewish State. The rest of the world, including the West, also stands to suffer heavily because of these paranoiac racist policies.

Hisham Abad

Palos Heights, IL
01/17/2009 @ 12:35pm

Web Letters: Gaza Notebook

By Fawaz A. Gerges

January 16, 2009

Lyon, France

Palos Heights, IL

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