Comment Re:Quiet, Troll (Score 1) 402
The only reason why Israel shows restraint is because the Western world have fucking had enough, and no matter how many politicians they scare and/or bribe, they are afraid of massive reactions which may result in the isolation of Israel. And no matter how smart you think Israelis are, their state would NOT survive in isolation.
Let's try to do this the scientific way, shall we?
Here's an alternative theory. Israel is just trying to protect itself. Over time, the Palestinians, with a stress on Hamas, have started combining their strategy. Instead of trying to directly fight Israel (through suicide bombers and rockets), they now employ a combined strategy, involving provoking Israel to the point Israel has no choice but to respond, and then sacrificing Palestinians (by placing them deliberately in harm's way) to gain two objectives. One is to make Israel not attack strategic locations (headquarters, ammo depos, etc.). The other is, when Israel does attack, to have as high as possible body counts, broadcasting horrendous pictures of death, swaying public opinion, convincing people like you that Israel is horrible.
Now, lets see if we can devise predictions based on which we can distinguish between the theories. If your theory is correct, hurting Palestinians would be an agenda inside Israel. Papers in Hebrew would write about it supportively. Politicians would brag about it during elections. More importantly, since, as you said, the world media's attention is giving this issue more and more focus, limiting Israel's ability to act, the Palestinian casualties count would be in a constant decline. You'd expect a peek around the time Israel was physically occupying areas, with a sharp decline once Gaza was evicted, and a further decline as time goes on since. You certainly wouldn't expect the IDF to invent never before used methods to warn people that an area is going to be bombed.
If I am correct, however, not hitting Palestinians would be an agenda. The Hebrew media would be focused around damage done to Israel, rather than to the Palestinians. When reporting Palestinian innocent casualties, it would be in a downbeat, rather than an upbeat, tone. You would hope to see official Hamas actions attempting to maximize Palestinian casualties. You'd also expect casualties count would be higher after Israel withdrew from Gaza than before. Finally, the "reactive Israel" theory predicts that major escalations by Israel take place after major attacks on civilian population by Hamas.
So which is it? Where is your smoking gun? Where are the huge happy headlines in Israeli papers hailing the high death toll this operation has had on Palestinians? Where are the politicians bragging about how many Palestinians they killed?
On the other hand, here is Hamas telling people to stay put when warned by Israel an area is going to be bombed. Here is a Hamas spokeman taking pride in sacrificing civilians. Here is Hamas firing a missile from a press studio. Please note these are all primary sources. They are not someone giving their interpretations of events. They are recording of the actual events. The only exception is the first link, where the primary source (reachable from within the article) is in Arabic.
Shachar