Speaking of Israel...

[Seamus Fermanagh]

AFAICS this is just another good old punitive campaign to demonstrate Israel's overwhelming military power and willingness to use it, in order to cow the other side into submission or at least a quiet period. Nothing wrong with it if that's the way you roll. Us western powers moved away from that by mid-20th century at the latest, but Israel isn't a western power. They're more westernised than most middle eastern countries, but they're a middle eastern country and they operate by those rules.

I am glad we of the effete West care about such things -- I think it represents an improvement in human governance and the use of power. I am happy that my country could no longer countenance the tactics employed without hesitation and with full official support in World War 2 or the intervention in Korea. I am happy that analogous actions taken during the Vietnam intervention, Gulf 1, Gulf 2 and the War on Terror [not what I would have called it] rarely have official sanction and have been in a number of cases successfully prosecuted as crimes. But nothing can make warfare humane.

Warfare probably started as a ritual clash between bands of hunter-gatherers which were more symbolic than violent. We still have vestiges of such rituals like the Inuit song duels to teach us of this.

When resources expanded following agriculture and metallurgy, war assumed its basic form. To wit: Defeat your opponents, kill the warriors who oppose you, kill the old or the young who will be a burden, take all of their valuta, acquire the younger women and breed them from your own men so that their maternalism binds them to your group thereafter. The defeated are thereby destroyed and cannot pose a renewed threat. Civilians v military; public v private property -- all such distinctions are irrelevant to war in its basic form. There are variations, but that is the essential character of war -- Clausewitz notwithstanding.

If warfare is less brutal than this model, then somebody is attempting to restrain or "limit" war -- usually for moral purposes. But there are always those for whom any such restraints are themselves wrong.