Thread:Comments:International Committee of the Red Cross condemns Gaza blockade/International Committee of the Red Cross condemns Gaza blockade/reply (5)

Of course ten Israeli deaths matter just as ten Palestinian deaths matter. The problem with brutal sanctioning is that you don't only punish the specific people/groups that are responsible - in fact you primarily punish innocent people. The people who have established this sanctioning are well aware more that many innocent people will be killed directly and many indirectly because of this sanctioning. It would not take much knowledge and experience to know fairly surely that your policies will bring death to innocent people in numbers that are far from proportional - numbers which do not seem well justified even in the name of protection of innocent Israeli citizens from terrorist violence.

It would be convenient to just stand on principle and hold evil enemy governments responsible for their own citizens and blame them for the fate of their innocent populations when they become "collateral damage" - but standing on philosophical abstraction is not a position that justifies so much death. The same situation applied to Iraq BEFORE the second Iraq war - we can blame Saddam all we like but U.S. sanctions killed thousands of innocent Iraqis long before any occupational force returned - do we have the right to put the lives of all those innocent people in the hands of someone like Saddam just so we can prove to him our own strength? What good will holding him responsible do for them? These kinds of tactics show weakness - not strength. No innocent deaths should be taken lightly and potential for future hazard to innocent life is not an automatic justification for going on the offensive and killing more Palestinian citizens - especially in completely unproportional numbers.