Benjamin Netanyahu Quotes
If we accept the notion that terrorists will have immunity because as they fire on civilians they hide behind civilians, then this tactic will be legitimized and the terrorists will have their greatest victory.
Netanyahu, Benjamin. "Address to the United Nations General Assembly." New York, 24 Sept. 2009.
Hamas, a terrorist organization controlling Gaza at that time had fired a thousand missiles into Israel. To stop them, the Israeli Defense Force using air power destroyed hundreds of Hamas facilities and homes of Hamas leaders. They also killed many Hamas terrorists, but at the same time there were also civilian casualties including women and children. Some critics of Israel formulated a moral equivalence between the two sides especially since the Israeli’s had anti-missile defense that exploded most of the missiles in flight. The Israeli Prime Minister explained the moral and ethical distinction. The Israeli’s did not strike any building without warning; they always notified the population in advance as to which target would be hit—something that no other nation had ever done in an armed conflict. However, Hamas forced many civilians to remain in the targeted buildings and almost all of the civilian casualties were to the civilians who Hamas decided to sacrifice. The facilities attacked were all places where Hamas had stored weapons or were command and control facilities, or were used for planning terrorist activities or were the residences of Hamas fighters of high rank. All these are legitimate targets under the rules of war, and the military force that uses them are responsible for clearing the civilians out. In this case, the kept them in, and in many cases sent them in, so that the Israeli military forces would be accused of injuring or killing innocent civilians.
60,000 English men, women, and children had been killed by German terror bombing of London and other English cities. The policy had been to retaliate and bomb German population centers. Over 4 million British homes had been destroyed by the blitz and Churchill was becoming concerned that when the Allies would occupy Germany shortly, there would be no German housing left for the civilian population much less for the Allied occupying forces. Churchill’s Air Attaché persuaded him NOT to send the memorandum with it’s references to the terror bombing in retaliation. The memorandum was rewritten with the references to “terror” removed. The bombing of cities did stop as a result.
See {620373} for a contrary point of view. Arguably, the kind of ruthlessness that would be required to defeat an insurgency with a strictly military approach would require too brutal and barbarous treatment of civilians who may aid insurgents, that Modern Democracies with their open media are incapable of. In the US invasion of Iraq or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the total number of civilians killed by the military was tiny, compared to the 20 million Russians killed by the Germans in their attempted invasion of Russia. The entire Gaza war produced only about 1000 civilian deaths out of 1 million people was one tenth of one percent compared with the American civilian casualties at the hands of the British in 1776 was over 100 times greater.
Benjamin Netanyahu is an Israeli politician serving as the prime minister of Israel since 2009, having previously served in that role from 1996 to 1999. Netanyahu is also the chairman of the Likud – National Liberal Movement. He is the longest-serving Israeli prime minister in history and the first to be born in Israel after its Declaration of Independence.
