The current US military involvement in the world is largely offensive in both meanings of the term.

The majority of current Israeli military involvement is genuinely defensive. Not always the way it is carried out, but the origination certainly is.

Lebanon from Hezbollah shelling and abduction. (That's how it started, with shelling of civilian town.)

Hamas shelling civilians in Sderot.

It is time to end the occupation, so that roadblocks are someone else's business, and the borders are borders, not jurisdictions of occupation.

But, when that occurs, when a border is violated by the action of a militia, and accepted by the Palestinian government, that then becomes a potential act of war.

Not a good outcome.

"Now Ashkelon is in the line of fire, too. It's coming to a point where something has to be done. But I understand the problem of Gaza's being so tightly packed that going in there with soldiers will have to be done very carefully, because of world opinion." – Myra Kraft

Isn't there something about la-di-da Myra Kraft which reminds us of Leona Helmsley, the "Queen of Mean"? I'm talking about the way Myra flits back and forth from New York to Tel Aviv on her husband's private jet (bought partly with public subsidies for his Patriots stadium), hobnobs with the elite, and cavalierly suggests that "something has to be done" about those deplorable Gazans, packed like vermin into their cramped little nest.

It recalls a dinner party I attended in the swanky Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, "Africa's richest square mile." The house was protected by armed- response security, as all of them are. Guests lamented the violent criminal tendencies of the Africans, "packed" into the teaming black suburb of Alexandra nearby. Something would have to be done, they reckoned. Israelis, like apartheid-era South Africans, prefer to keep their central cities pure, and park the second-class citizens in distant outposts from which they must commute in to work.

Myra Kraft seems intellectually incapable of drawing an analogy between the Gazan ghetto and the Warsaw ghetto, even if only to reject it. The ideology of zionism has blinded her.

Here's the ultimate irony: despite the supposed 15-point Jewish IQ advantage, the tribal meme of zionism has interfered with the objective application of this intelligence to the subject of Israel. All of the reasoning toward Israel is subjective, emotional, irrational. Evidently, the tribal gene has trumped the intelligence gene, and not for the first time. Zionism is a social disease which spreads by intellectual contagion. The old IBM slogan supplies the antidote: THINK!

"The majority of current Israeli military involvement is genuinely defensive." Oh gawd, Richard, you made me spit coffee onto the computer screen. Thanks for the laugh, bro! ;-)

Witty is ridiculous. He chatters about context while ignoring the Israeli version of Lebensraum, the essence of which is a mode of terror imposed upon Palestineans. Shouldn't a more balanced point of view be that the perpetrators get what they deserve?

If the law were enforced the same for Jews as it is for non-Jews, the Krafts would be under arrest for giving material aid to terrorism.

They would be subjected to interrogation according to Dershowitzian principles.

And all their assets would be seized.

Not to mention the irony that she and her husband own a football team called the Patriots.

With a ruling elite like this, who needs enemies?