israel meets the "hope and change deadline" (probably)

A few days ago Jon Stewart joked about how Israel was rushing to get any last-minute bombing in before the "hope and change deadline" of Inauguration Day. "It's like a civilian carnage Toyotathon!"

Damn, he was right.

Israel Hopes to Complete Gaza Troop Pull-Out by Tuesday

While Obama has made it abundantly clear just how much he loves Israel (there was even an amusing moment in one of the presidential debates where he and Hillary argued over who loved Israel more), the Israeli government seems to think that he may approach foreign policy with a bit more...finesse, shall we say. And that could mean no more smashy-smashy for at least a little while.

While a wise student of politics would note that the Democrats have historically been no better for the Palestinians than the Republicans, there is no doubt that the Bush administration's extra-aggressive foreign policy style has set a particularly bad example, which Israel has followed with glee.

Someone once described Bush's foreign policy as "if you don't like the way the game's going, flip the chess board over." Israel has taken the opportunity to do some board-flipping of its own:

Battle of Jenin, April 2002: Israel surrounded the camp (one of the few places where different factions of the resistance coordinated with each other and sometimes fought together) and flattened a 100m by 200m section of it. The UN confirmed 52 dead, but allegations of houses being bulldozed on top of people and mass graves holding perhaps hundreds continued to circulate. Unfortunately Israel refused to allow a UN fact-finding mission to investigate the matter, so the truth may never be known.

"Second" Lebanon War, July-August 2006: in which Israel blew up the parts of Beirut that had been rebuilt after it blew them up the first time in the 1980s

Current Gaza War, December 2008-January 2009 (?): you know the score

It's worth noting that each of these incidents did very little to destroy the infrastructure of any of the organizations of Palestinian resistance that Israel was supposedly targeting. Any smart military strategist would probably have realized that going in. So what's the point of a war that can't be won? Punishment.