The Hamas are nothing but murderous thugs. They will have to be dealt with militarily by somebody whether it is the Israelis or by the so-called Palestinians themselves.

Pish-posh. They're the Haganah.

No, they are the Stern Gang (of which, I might add, Yitzhak Shamir was a leader), a group much further to the right than even Menahem Begin.

There was not one real war crime committed by the Israeli resistance to the British imperialists.

If that's your standard there have been none by the Palestinians against the Israeli imperialists.

All the targets of the Israelis were military targets, the so-called Palestinians have targetted pizzerias, bus stations and hotels. That is a significant difference.

If you're going to buy British propaganda hook, line and sinker, at least be honest about it.

All targets are military--ask Hiroshimans or Dresdenians.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden were all military targets, centers of heavy industry and the like. The King David Hotel was British military HQ. Deir Yassin was a rat's nest of Muslim thugs and murderers not unlike Fallujah.

The pizzeria in Netanya that got blown up was merely a pizzeria. The World Trade Center was a commercial office complex.

If you want to eliminate the entire distinction between civilian and military targets and move to a 'total war' framework, that's a different matter and the subject of a different discussion. Hell, I'd probably agree with you. A Dresden-style firebombing of Ramallah killing all its inhabitants, along with a promise to do the same to other Muslim cities should terror continue, would do a lot more to end PLO terrorism than 100 security fences.

If however you wish to maintain the current operative definitional framework of what is civilian and what isn't, then equating the attacks on British military targets like the King David Hotel with attacks on pizzerias and hotels or farms is intellectually indefensible.

A closer parallel would be the Broederbund and the National Party of Malan & Vervoerd in South
Africa.

Bart:

Hiroshima was saved so we could see the damage. It could be because it wasn't a military target. Civilians are fair game, especially in a democracy.

Bart is correct. Hiroshima was a military target, the headquarters of the Japanese Fifth Army:

http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/photo1-19.html

IIRC Hiroshima was also a major IJN support base; the fleet's main anchorage at Kure, on the Inland Sea, wasn't all that far away.

Had it been a significant target it would have been bombed previously. It wasn't. Indeed, because it hadn't been people thought it was safe and gathered there.

OJ is right: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden were not legitimate military targets. The attacks on them cannot be justified.

Paul,

Bombing them shortened the war, reducing American casualties, therefore they were justified. The Japanese shoulda thought of that before Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March, and Adolf Hitler shoulda thought of that before declaring war on us. They reaped the whirlwind.

It is unjust to will evil that good may come. We willed the evil of innocent death. The action cannot be morally justified.

"Innocent" is a mistaken term. The German people (and, to a lesser degree, the Japanese people) were responsible for the political conditions in their respective countries in 1933, 1941, and 1945. They may have been powerless against the insanity, but they were not robots and they were not slaves.

Dresden is more complicated than Hiroshima, because the use of the bomb on Japan saved more lives than would have been spent on the invasion.

Also, the embrace of evil by Japan and Germany required the sharpest possible response to break that embrace (which is why unconditional surrender worked, arguments about Communism aside).