Karsh, Totten, Levy and Sullivan on Israeli "War Crimes"

Sounds like a law firm in Queens.

Efraim Karsh explains the Western obsession with Israeli behavior:

The extraordinary international preoccupation with the Palestinians is a corollary of their interaction with Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, a reflected glow of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Had their dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the interest that it presently does.

On the other hand (the very other hand), Gideon Levy feels the world has been too lenient with Israel. He expects war crimes investigations of Olmert, Barak and Livni:

Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will stand at the forefront of the guilty. Two of them are candidates for prime minister, the third is a candidate for criminal indictment.
It is inconceivable that they not be held to account for the bloodshed. Olmert is the only Israeli prime minister who sent his army to two wars of choice, all during one of the briefest terms in office. The man who made a number of courageous statements about peace late in his tenure has orchestrated no fewer than two wars.

I'm somewhere in the vast middle. Karsh's view discounts the idea that Israel, a sovereign state, is capable of doing wrong. Levy makes Israel a scapegoat. Unlike Andrew, I don't think Israel is committing war crimes. Israel is fighting an enemy that intentionally seeks to kill  civilians; in the course of fighting Hamas, Israel does some stupid and brutal things, but, by Andrew's standard, every act of self-defense by a Western nation against Islamist insurgents is a war crime. For the record, I don't think that Israeli tanks can create moderation in Gaza, and I can't quite fathom the idea that Israeli politicians would be so quick to insert ground troops into a territory they previously were quite desperate to leave. But I'm with Michael Totten on these questions:

There is a non-hysterical case to be made against Israel's war in Gaza. The fact that people are being killed in the war is not it. Innocents as well as combatants die in every war. If you have nothing to object to besides that, then you should oppose the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan for the same reason. That war is also being fought "disproportionately." Far more innocent civilians have been killed over there than in Gaza. No doubt the rage among some in the Islamic world at the sight of those innocents killed encourages them to join the fight against us.

And Afghanistan isn't currently shooting rockets at the United States.

Nearly every argument I have read and heard about Israel's war in Gaza applies ten-fold to the war in Afghanistan. Yet many, if not most, of the very same people who deploy those arguments support the war in Afghanistan.