Changing my mind on Gaza and Iraq

I am not following Gaza much and I do not claim to be an expert. I had assumed that Israel had no choice but to attack Gaza, but this article from the Wall Street Journal, a paper which broadly supports Israel, suggests Egypt and Israel in partnership provoked the cruel war. The article is worth reading.

Clearly, instead of being surrounded by enemies, Israel has friends in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Netanyahu rushed to blame the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli boys on Hamas, which set off the chain reaction of reprisals. But this is not important any more, as Hamas's activities and the tunnels are an unanswerable retrospective justification for the Israeli attack. It seems Hamas was planning to use the tunnels to attack Israel.

As Con Coughlin writes today in The Daily Telegraph:

Captured Hamas fighters have provided details of the planned September 24 assault when militants intended to attack Jewish communities and capture as many Israelis as possible. 

This would certainly explain why Israeli military officials are now reporting that the tunnels, apart from storing large numbers of missiles and heavy explosives, were also stocked with tranquillisers, handcuffs, syringes, ropes and all the other paraphernalia used for dealing with captives.

However, for all this, I am not sure whether the street credibility that the invasion gives Israel in its neighbourhood outweighs the loathing of Israel that it provoked, not in the world at large, which perhaps does not matter to Israel, but in the USA.

I suppose that Hamas is in power in Gaza because Likud failed to come to an agreement with Abbas, who had acceded to every Israeli precondition. Israel responded by accelerated settlement building. I presume that Netanyahu did this for fear of people further to the right than he is. On the other hand, there is no reason to believe a deal with Fatah would prevent Hamas one day coming to power in the West Bank.

Behind the story is demographics. Religious Jews are having more children than secular ones and religious Jews are more right-wing than secular ones - they believe they have a God-given right to the West Bank.

I am still much more interested, though, in ISIS in Iraq and what Mr. Putin is doing in Ukraine. 

I have changed my mind on Iraq too. A humanitarian intervention is necessary to save Yezidis, Christians and Muslims from ISIS. 

I recognise this humanitarian impulse, though, was the same impulse that made me want England to intervene in Libya which led to disastrous results. The same kind heartedness led me to want Presidents Mubarak and Assad, at one point, to be toppled. How wrong those ideas were.