I know you just hit on the same themes as well, but allow me to copy you into a discussion from another forum and my reply, take what you need for this one here:
-snip-
Over the top retaliation would be carpet bombing Gaza City or tactical nukes to root out Hamas, just for example. I think they are being as judicious as they can be. They know how this plays around the world.
How should Isreal respond to rocket attacks from a neighboring territory? What would be a proportionate response?
Simple, just some of a wide spectrum of options to be applied single or joint (not even have tried one of those fuels my suspicion of plain cynism on their - and the others, with different reasons - side):
- get international backup and an SC consensus to agree on acting on HAMAS
- turn off the money to HAMAS
- turn off Egypitan/Syrian/Iranian support via international consensus AND/OR selective elimination (dont tell me Mossad has no clue who is feeding Hamas?)
- get EU/US/UN troops to secure the areas rockets get fired from, also the tunnels
- get your SpecOps going and anihilate leaders and actors with their hand in the mass
- 24/7 TUAV/JLENS etc. (which I suppose they have up anyway), strike on the guys when they´re about to fire
- Negotiate other cease fire
- Separate the civilian pop from their leaders by offerenig alternatives (youth in gaza have ablolutely *no* perspective because of the enforced blockade)
- More creative stuff: Offer $ 500.000/5.000.000 and asylum incl. family in the EU to each Hamas fighter/leader resigning
etc. etc.
Why is it so easily forgotten that... -snip-
... Israel (its later political leaders respectively) came 2k years later than the palestinians to the same area and *
started* the whole story by getting their state through sheer terrorism (Irgun - = Etzel - vs. King David Hotel, Massacre of Deir Yassin, Haganah, Balfour Declaration, Ben Gurion, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, etc, google for youself and you get an idea of the amount of brainwash we have been going through the last 50 yrs, history is always the history of the
winners...).
Interstingly they called all those terrorist acts with more than 1k death toll "defense"...
Sounds familiar?
Rattler