Israel, Terrorism, and the Well-Intentioned Left

Here's an interesting set of readings on Israel and terrorism worth mentioning:

Michael Totten's got a "A Dispatch from the Border with Gaza," which includes this passage on Colonel Miri Eisen's strategic assessment on the Palestinian rocket threat to Israel:

I visited Sderot and the Gaza border region again with some of my colleagues on a trip organized by the American Jewish Committee. IDF Colonel Miri Eisen accompanied us and gave us the Israeli perspective on what was happening ....

Colonel Eisen held up a map that showed which cities in Israel would be under attack if the same kinds of rockets flying out of Gaza today were being launched from inside the West Bank.

Every major population center in the country would be under attack except Haifa. Yet Haifa is within Hezbollah's rocket range out of Lebanon in the north. When Hezbollah fired its medium-size Katyusha rockets at Haifa in 2006, Haifa was on fire and emptied of people and cars. It was like a city at the end of the world. It's possible, though very intolerable, to live under Qassam rocket attack. It isn't possible to live long at all under Katyusha rocket attack.

If this nightmare scenario ever unfolds, Israel will be in a fight for its life.

In quoting, I've skipped over a lot of the text, plus photos, so be sure to check the link.

Also worth reading is the exchange at the Wall Street Journal, "Terrorism, Evil and Mourning a Pearl of Great Price." Be sure to check the link. Bill Moyers responds to Judea Pearl, but the final letter from Gary Novak of San Diego is something worth considering:

Judea Pearl's opinion piece effectively poses a question many well-intentioned leftists who take their enlightenment for granted have never considered: At what point do those who participate in the normalization of evil cease to be useful idiots and become evil themselves.