As the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis heats up I keep hearing a common refrain from defenders of the suicide bombing murderers of woman and children. With some slight variation it goes along the lines of "Israel has F-16s and tanks, what do you expect the Palestinians to do?"
Well, to start with I expect them to explore all possible diplomatic opportunities to meaningfully negotiate with Israel. (This is of course assumes that the Palestinians have real interest in negotiations. In reality I believe the whole claim that if Israel returns to it's pre-1967 borders there will be peace is ludicrous. The Palestinians want complete control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip now as a prelude to a future takover of all of Israel much in the same way that Hitler's claim to the Sudetenland was merely a step before taking all of Czechoslovakia in 1938.) Failing that I expect them to wage a war to "liberate" their land if they see no other alternative. I expect them to raise a force and fight what they regard as an "occupying" army employing classic guerilla warfare tactics successfully used in the past by similarly outnumbered and outgunned armies. I may not agree with their cause but at least I could understand and accept these methods.
What I do not expect them to do is to deliberately target innocent civilians in settings designed to deliver maximum physical and pyschological damage to the population. If an Israeli civilian is killed inadvertently in an attack on an Israeli army position I can understand it. This is equivilant to the manner in which the majority of the Palestinian civilian casualties have occurred, not in deliberate attacks by the Israelis on innocents. This is the difference.
If one is to accept the proposition that because the Palestinians can't match Israel on the military battlefield it is acceptable for them to kill and maim innocent civilians what kind of precedent are we setting for countries or groups that have differences with the United States? Since we are far and away the world's premier military power does this logic not allow any of these countries or groups to target American civilians as fair game since they cannot hope to match us on the battlefield?
It's also interesting to imagine those who support the Palestinian terror actions of today conferring this same level of support to other groups of the past. Didn't the Sandinistas have the MIGs and T-72's back in 1985? If a Contra had walked into a crowded Managua cooperative store and detonated a nail bomb killing woman and children waiting to buy shoes would we have heard the same refrain "what do you expect them to do?".
