That's the 4th time in the last few days you've used Nazi imagery to describe Israel.
That veneer is getting mighty transparent.
Let me stop the discussion for a second to say --
this is something you, bit_torrent, and you, JihadJane (and others of the same cloth) should actually stop and consider.
I don't know if you have me on ignore because you never address anything I say, but if you can read this, stop and
think about this. I just made a reply saying that I used to be a Palestine-supporter. I was never a supporter of terrorism, as certain others here, but I believed the IDF was in the wrong and questioned whether Israel should've existed in the first place.
Consider this for a moment. As an ignorant bystander, I was confronted with a discussion that was actually educational, from people who knew what they were talking about and backed up their positions with facts.
Detrimental to this progress in me was pro-Israeli posters like Thunder, who wasn't interested in rational discussion
Now consider this for a moment. We have here this thread. On the one hand are people who are discussing the subject. Then we have people like me, who have opinions, but are for all intents and purposes laymen.
Then we have people who support Palestine with one-liners, tonnes of pictures and links, compare Israelis to Nazis, and who either ignore posters who talk to them or just sit there and shout "no u!".
For an innocent bystander who's on the fence about the whole issue, what effect do you think your posts have?
Are the homes of Israeli soldiers also then legitimate targets?
It depends. Here in Norway we have an institution of the army known as the
heimvern, which translates to something like Home Guard. It is comprised of servicemen who live civilian lives for the most part, but who can be called upon to fight on short notice. For a while they even kept their service weapons in their homes.
If I was part of an invading army, I suppose that yes, targetting the homes of
heimvern fighters would be a legitimate course of action (especially if a group of HV servicemen had gathered in a single house to plan an attack, for example), as long as you were 100% sure no civilians would get killed.
I don't know if the IDF has an equivalent of the HV, though, but as another poster explained, yes, bases of operations are legitimate targets. Heck,
any building, be it a school, mosque or hospital, becomes a legitimate target the second you station combatants there. That's according to the Geneva Conventions:
Art. 18. Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.
States which are Parties to a conflict shall provide all civilian hospitals with certificates showing that they are civilian hospitals and that the buildings which they occupy are not used for any purpose which would deprive these hospitals of protection in accordance with Article 19.
Art. 19. The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit and after such warning has remained unheeded.
The fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals, or the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants which have not yet been handed to the proper service, shall not be considered to be acts harmful to the enemy.
In other words, the second you use a hospital, TV station, school or home as a terrorist camp, your enemies are allowed to hit you. That's the rules of war as laid down by the International Committee of the Red Cross, to be obeyed by all fighting forces, not just those of Israel.
If you have moral objections, that's fine, but when it comes to the rules of engagement, houses are legitimate targets. Heck, I don't believe houses are protected by the GCs in the first place, so technically it doesn't even matter if they're used for military purposes (and, of course, as anyone who's watched a war film or played a first-person shooter, they tend to get shot up pretty bad in gunfights anyway).
Doesn't this, by your implied logic, make any part of Israel a legitimate target?
Doesn't matter, because either way, what HAMAS is doing is intentionally targeting civilians, which is, for all intents and purposes, not allowed.
It was passed by the UN who then accepted Israel as a nation state. You may have heard that Palestine has not been.
Yup. People may complain about Israel's right to exist all they want, but really, most other countries' rationale for existing is just that... well, they were better at fighting than the other guys.
Why are Norway and Sweden sovereign states while Lappland isn't? We were stronger than them, and we built cities while they had a nomadic lifestyle, which allowed us to settle and take over their land fairly easily.
Now, that's a great justification
.
