Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
I think an important aspect of situations like this involve your opinion regarding the difference between accepting collateral deaths of civilians when pursuing an objective and actually NEEDING those deaths. The gut reaction of most western countries is to think there is a big difference. If 100 innocent civilians die because of an operation but the perpetuators are obviously legitimately sad about it (and maybe even prevented many deaths by warning people beforehand) westerners are not as appalled as they are by operations that require the same number (or fewer) innocent deaths to help achieving their objective. This in spite of the fact that those that died do not care if their killers wanted them dead. The problem for the killers though is that they don't realize that even if there is little logic to considering one of the actions much more justifiable, many people do. Furthermore, those who do consider the one action much worse, stop considering the other aspects of the dispute and will gravitate to the side that don't like innocent civilian deaths even if they are, in other ways, in the wrong.
Terrorists (and it's hard to consider Hamas as anything but terrorists, because their operations make no sense at all in conventional military terms) essentially work by provoking retaliation, which they think provides an ongoing pretext for their preferred activity of killing people. They don't have any other reason for being.