What's the big deal about 1500 civilian casualties in Gaza?

Make no mistake; Operation Off the Cliff is political theatre of the highest order. It's not about tunnels and it's not about rockets; it's about avoiding any "peace" that would threaten the long-term goal of the maximalists in Israeli politics, the eventual consolidation of a "greater Israel" from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Or perhaps from the Euphrates to the Nile... it's always tough to nail down the borders of the Promised Land.

All the blather about "rockets raining on Israel" sounds good but doesn't justify a war that at this moment has taken the lives of 56 IDF soldiers. That's twice as many dead in a couple of weeks as the number of Israeli civilians killed by Gaza rocket attacks over the last 15 years.

Those Gaza rockets have claimed the same number of Israelis in fifteen years as lose their lives every month in traffic accidents.

In other words, there's absolutely nothing about the rocket threat that could possibly justify the thousands of civilian Palestinian deaths in this war on Gaza, and the one before, and the one before that.

Having said that, the war boosters have a point when they accuse the world of hypocrisy for its condemnation of Israel, especially when that condemnation is emanating from that most exceptional nation, the United States.

Afghanistan has never fired a single rocket at the US, but tens of thousands of innocent Afghan civilians have died at the hands of the US military.

Iraq has never fired a single rocket at the US, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died at the hands of the US military.

Vietnam never fired a single rocket at America, yet millions of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of the US military.

So, yes, it's hard to argue with that charge of hypocrisy.

Gaza "ground operation" thus far limited to long-evacuated north Gaza communities

So far it looks like Netanyahu's so-called "ground invasion" of Gaza is being engineered to get the ink while avoiding the stink.

This is probably a shrewd political move. Everybody understands that neither the IDF or the government have any interest in house-to-house and street-to-street combat in Gaza.

But sending a few tanks into the north and trumpeting a "ground operation" will get lots of PR in the West. The "international community" will plead for restraint, the IDF will grudgingly accommodate those pleas, and Israel can once again claim the moral high ground for aborting a ground mission that would have had calamitous consequences...

But so far it looks like a PR stunt limited to a few nearly-deserted communities in the north of Gaza.