Collective Punishments

Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s Foreign Minister, on an official jaunt to Morocco, has said that what Israel is doing in Gaza at the moment is incomprehensible to international public opinion. Well international public opinion, whatever that is, may find current Israeli policy to be unwise, counterproductive and possibly illegal but I doubt if anyone will find it incomprehensible. It’s not a result of Ehud Barak getting out of bed with a sore head every day. It’s happening because since Israel pulled out Gaza more than two years ago rockets have been fired from there at the town of Sderot and the surrounding area. Not very deadly rockets it’s true, just enough to kill occasionally, but plenty deadly enough to make normal life in that area of Israel something between difficult and impossible. So the Israeli government has to do something to protect its citizens. What it’s doing doesn’t appear to be very effective so far and at least one measured Israeli analyst is dead against it but it’s hard to imagine any other government put in the same situation doing much different. What, I wonder, would D’Alema’s government do if a small southern Italian town, Salerno say, had been bombarded with homemade rockets by a Camorra clan for the last two years? Before you answer “It couldn’t possibly stoop to collective punishment.”, remember this.