Flying Pink Unicorns

Just recently, a rocket launched from Gaza has made it further north from Gaza than ever before. Israel has, predictably, retaliated in a way guaranteed not to solve the problem.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1198517286564&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Haven't we seen this movie? Israel really should pick one of these rocket attacks as a pretext and launch a full-out war in Gaza to capture or kill the Hamas leadership. The US put out a deck of 52 cards to get people who really hadn't attacked us AT ALL, and certainly hadn't attacked us on 9-11. Hamas, on the other hand, are people LEADING WHAT PASSES FOR A GOVERNMENT which HAS attacked Israel and will do so again. Adequate causus belli!! The Israeli public would I THINK get behind a major incursion/war designed to eliminate Hamas' leadership altogether it if they thought Israel would WIN. Of course, then there's Lebanon, 2006. The damage that whole affair has done to Israel's national security is the gift that keeps on giving, as is Prime Minister Olmert.

So instead, we'll have half and quarter measures, which will inflame P opinion a decent % as much as a full blown war would, with the added bonus of neither solving the problem nor making the price to the Ps in Gaza so high that they look to peace talks as a way out.

Obviously there's no easy answer, but pretending to negotiate with Abbas, who has zero control over Gaza/Hamas and only shaky control over Fatah and the West Bank is silly. MAYBE if Israel had wiped Hezbollah out in 2006, as I and so many others advocated, it would be in a strong enough local position to give negotiations another shot. But it didn't, it isn't, and that's that.

Israel is awfully hard to root for sometimes, what with having such a bad case of the stupids and all.