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The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas – the fourth since 2008 – has settled into a drearily predictable pattern.
First, Hamas seizes on some pretext to start lobbing rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, aiming indiscriminately at population centers. That’s terrorism, or it’s a war crime, take your pick.
Then outraged Israelis retaliate with air strikes and sometimes troop incursions, targeting Hamas leaders and fighters, as well as a labyrinthine network of tunnels the Islamist group has dug to move fighters, weapons and contraband beneath Gaza’s sealed borders.
Hamas has launched 3,000-plus rockets at Israel. Most have been intercepted by its Iron Dome missile defense system, but some do get through, and by showing it can inflict pain on Israel, Hamas burnishes its credentials as the leader of Palestinian resistance to Israel.
Its broader goal is to win sympathy throughout the Middle East and indict Israel as the aggressor in the court of world opinion. And, sure enough, it took less than a week for the usual chorus of credulous U.S. leftists and journalists to start decrying the “occupation” as justification for Hamas attacks and posit a false moral equivalence between the combatants.
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