The Israeli Way of War

Two years ago “I interviewed Yaacov Lozowick”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2006/09/getting-lebanon-wrong.php, then-chief archivist at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and he characterized Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon as stupid and indefensible. I agreed with him at the time, and I still do, as least about that war being stupid. (I do not believe Israel has no right to hit back at Hezbollah.)
Despite Lozowick’s criticism of the 2006 war, he is hardly a pacifist or an Israel-hater. He’s the author, after all, of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars.
If you’re following the current war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, you might want to “bookmark his site”:http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2009/01/waging-war-israeli-way.html where you can read short sharp analysis like the following:

In the week of air-attacks, the IDF proved it had excellent intelligence, and in many cases targets hit from the air kept on exploding for a number of minutes after they were hit, as the ordinance stored there exploded. More significant, the IDF has figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning. The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning. Of course, there remain the pictures of civilians surrounded by devastation, but they’re alive, and it wasn’t Israel that stacked bombs in their cellars. [Emphasis added.]

Think about those numbers. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the face of the earth. If Israeli Air Force pilots were trying to kill civilians — if they were the war criminals they’re accused of being all over the world — they’d kill a lot more than 0.8 people per air strike.