I’ll be nice and merely point out that even if the claim that 298 homes were destroyed – which I doubt since Almog was about to be charged with destroying only 59 homes when he visited England and he was the head of the Southern Command – that still means that each household would have to have about 125 people living in it to render 40,000 Palestinians homeless. We know Arafat told his people to be fruitful and multiply, but I doubt they were that fruitful. Even if they have the supposed average of 6 kids per family and even if HRW – which voted against Israel at Durban and therefore has no credibility with respect to Israel – is right about the 298 homes, that still leaves you with 2400 homeless Palestinians.

Surely that’s a meaningful number, but so is 1060 murdered Israelis and a few thousand more maimed and murdered. To remind you, the demolition of houses there was primarily done to prevent smuggling of bombs, guns and other means of killing Israelis.

Your HRW report deigns to tell us “The IDF has publicly admitted destroying houses to “weaken the fear of tunnels”or in response to other hypothetical risks. This doctrine conflates the legal requirement of absolute military necessity – a strict standard requiring that any property destruction must be connected to combat – with the much broader notion of security.”

Get it? You are relying upon a report that claims the smuggling is an imagined risk; a hypothetical risk.

Of course, you are commenting in a post where an Ha’aretz article gives us the skinny on the fact that this wasn’t at all hypothetical. It lets us know how severe the problem was, and how lucrative it was for households and smugglers. Imagine scoring half a million bucks in a place where per capita income is $2000/year. Imagine being a household scoring $30,000.

As for Corrie, I regret her death but she put herself in the path of a bulldozer with poor lines of sight and she stumbled or slipped at the absolute worst moment possible. She did this, whether you like it or not, to ostensibly protect the homes of families there. As the article points out, many families in the area were indeed involved in this smuggling trade, so while it may be true that the specific home in front of which Corrie died was not used for smuggling, it is clear that many of the homes she and the other ISMers were protecting from the evil IDF, were in fact used for tunnels – and being well compensated for it.

Other than being a cautionary tale, the death of Rachel Corrie was a total waste. The IDF was not knocking houses down that day. No homes were demolished that day. And mobius, really, you should know that the IDF definitely did not purposely kill Rachel Corrie. Don’t play into the hands of the haters, don’t be a pawn of those that seek to capitalize on a family’s tragedy.

nice of you to continue to tap dance on the girl’s grave tho. it’s a play right out of the lgf handbook. which of course, you wouldn’t possibly be familiar with, being the “progressive” centrist you are.

Haaretz has a truly great piece of investigative journalism, about the tunnel diggers in Gaza. “The Burrowers” reveals that tunnels are big business-the average “tunnel entrepreneur” makes half a million dollars over the (usually short) lifetime of…

The Egyptians don’t kid around,” Jaber says. “There, on the other side, if they find a house where a tunnel has been dug, it is the death penalty for everyone. There are no games. With them the law is the law and punishment is punishment.

Can you imagine the uproar of the Israelis had executed anyone found with a tunmnel under their house?

But let the Egyptians do it and nobody says squat.

Israeli Double Standard Time.