The Zionists are whining thread

iAnus_sl said:

I honestly don't think that Israel believes that it can kill its way to victory either. I honestly don't. That you can find Israelis, highly placed and influential, which would claim that they not only can but must kill their way to victory seems inevitable and obvious.

I think they do believe that to get to the understanding that has to exist in order for a lasting peace -- to get there will require killing. I believe that because when you listen to their statesmen that is what the statesmen say. And when you look at the applications of their violence, the general pattern supports the rhetoric. The general pattern.

And I don't think I'm the only one listening. I think Hamas also listens, and has formed a counter-strategy. Its a bizzare strategy in that it is most effective when it is most self-harmful.

I think you see a situation where the Israeli leadership values the life of the Palestinian (the life, not the living conditions, the life itself) more highly than the Palestinian leadership. And that is horrific. That attitude has to change. Hamas has to be given something to lose. Because right now, for now, they have obviously decided that being slaughtered is preferable to living. Which is why some would argue, "Well then lets indulge them".

The point where I very much do agree with you is that I don't understand how anyone hopes to accomplish that through isolation and oppression. I don't think it's a long term plan, and this situation is a long term crisis. If you listen to them speak many of the Israeli leaders say exactly the same. And then some will say fuck it, kill them all, God will know his own. It's not some kind of monolithic conciousness.

They need another moderate swing. But it's not like it is here. That shit isfucking dangerous. You start preaching trust and your sister gets beheaded. Something like that could make a man feel foolish.

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An especially pernicious metaphor of increasing prominence in the Israeli strategic vocabulary is "mowing the grass." I first encountered it some years ago in a private meeting of American and Israeli security analysts considering the problem of Iran's nuclear program.

Most of the Israelis in the room advocated military strikes against Iran's nuclear sites. An American colleague pointed out that a military strike would set back Iran's program no more than two to four years, and that one can't bomb the knowledge of how to build a centrifuge out of the heads of Iranian engineers.

To this, a former Israeli official replied, ".we'll just bomb them again and keep bombing them every four years, like mowing the grass." The Americans in the room were aghast. A war in the Middle East between regional powers every four years?

It was a shocking suggestion, partly because no modern country has ever adopted a strategy of active, continuous warfare, and partly because it was offered in such an off-hand manner. In the years since that meeting, I have frequently heard Israeli analysts advocate a "mowing the grass" approach to Iran.

Today, that metaphor is being been applied anew in a disturbing context: Gaza. Israel has invaded Gaza to quell Hamas's rocket attacks, and, now, to destroy its tunnel networks. Civilian casualties are mounting, and Israeli analysts are talking about "mowing the grass" to explain their strategy.

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For most of Israel's existence, conventional Arab militaries, of countries such as Egypt and Syria, were its greatest threats. Think the three wars Israel fought against its Arab neighbors in 1948, 1967, and 1973.

During that period, Israel believed that Arab states wouldn't willingly accept Israel's continued existence, making an immediate peace deal impossible. Israel also knew it couldn't coerce its neighbors into signing a peace treaty by force. So the country developed an alternative approach to managing a threat it believed could not be immediately solved. Israel would have to live with a certain level of threat, it believed, but would use its military to occasionally weaken those threats and ensure they didn't ever reach truly existential proportions. The point of Israel's strategy was to ameliorate its security problems until a political solution to the threat from Arab states could be found.


"Israel's military doctrine has long been to cause damage to its enemies, without being able to take them over completely," Brent Sasley, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who studies Israeli politics, says. "Because it never could."

Israel applied this strategy to militant groups as well. "Israel has suffered from a terrorism problem since 1948," Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown, writes in an exhaustive study of Israeli counterterrorism's successes and failures. In Byman's assessment, Israel's approach to individual wars has "border[ed] on brilliant." Yet it "often blunders from crisis to crisis without a long-term plan for how to solve the problem once and for all." That's because, in Israeli strategic thought, many of these problems just can't be fully solved by military force.

The applies today. "Israelis see themselves as being under siege," Sasley says. "Hamas, like any of these other previous threats, needs to be managed. You can't defeat them completely. They need to be managed."


Obviously, Israel recognizes that the threats from groups like the Gaza-based militant group Hamas aren't the same as the Cold War-era threats it faced from Arab invasions.So it's developed a new version of its long-held threat management strategy, which is often called "mowing the grass." It's a pretty creepy term, as it implies that periodically killing people is the same as keeping your lawn groomed. But that's the basic analogy: Hamas, like grass, can't disappear, but it can be regularly cut down to size. And, like mowing the grass, it's implied that this is a routine that will be continued forever.

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Faltigoth_sl said:

It worked out for them because they accepted they were beaten, took the offers to help rebuild their devastated countries, and moved on without launching a decades-long guerrilla war.

Don't see that happening in Gaza.

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