Is kidnapping a soldier a recognized "act of war"?

For once, TL, I have to disagree strongly. I have no sympathy for the Israeli "defence" forces, for they are clearly out to wipe the Palestinian people off the face of the Earth. It's as simple as that.

I have no sympathy for the Israeli "defence" forces, for they are clearly out to wipe the Palestinian people off the face of the Earth. It's as simple as that.

but have earned the right to do so after 6 years of their civilinas being targeted

(Reuters) - Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed up to seven Israelis in Lebanese border violence on Wednesday, inflaming Middle East tensions.
Here is a short chronology of the Middle East conflict since the beginning of the year.
January 25 - Islamic militant group Hamas defeats Fatah movement of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in first Palestinian parliamentary election in a decade.
March 29 - Abbas swears in Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his government.
June 9 - Hamas armed wing calls off 16-month-old truce after seven family members are killed on a Gaza beach during a day of Israeli shelling. Israel denies responsibility for the deaths.
June 13 - Israel kills 11 Palestinians, nine of them civilians, in a missile strike on a van carrying militants and rockets in Gaza.
June 25 - Gaza militants launch deadly raid into Israel, killing two soldiers and capturing Corporal Gilad Shalit. Three days later Israel pushes into Gaza.
June 29 - Israeli troops in the West Bank detain one third of the Palestinian cabinet and nearly two dozen Hamas lawmakers.
July 3 - Israeli forces move into northern Gaza. Three days later the offensive is expanded after a rocket fired by Hamas hits the Israeli city of Ashkelon for the first time.
July 8 - Haniyeh calls for a cease-fire with Israel. Jewish state says militants must first free the captured soldier and halt rocket attacks.
July 12 - Hizbollah guerrillas capture two Israeli soldiers and kill up to seven around the Lebanese border. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls it an "act of war" by Lebanon.
-- Israel broadens Gaza offensive and cuts the strip in two. Attacks, including an air raid that kills nine family members, take the Palestinian toll from the offensive to well over 70.

BigTex where the hell have you been Israel is doing those things. They have cut power, water, made it difficult for food to get it.

The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.

We see quite clearly that the actions of the Israelis against the Palestinians mirror our actions against Iraqis. We have dehumanized them to the point where the indiscriminate killing of civilans is of no concern to the soldiers, this administration, the press, and a great many of our citizens. So there you have it. Two of the supposedly great, well educated, self-proclaimed moral democracies of the world engaging in inhuman, indiscriminate killing of innocent people including children without much protest. We have lost our souls and our moral bearings. If this is what democracy is about, why would anyone want to adopt it? For us, we need to ask ourselves is this really the kind of country we want? One that murders during elective wars and doesn't care.

If they wanted to harm the masses, they easily could do so. They haven't done so at this point, but have earned the right to do so after 6 years of their civilians being targeted.

The tank actually swerved out of its way to roll over the parked car, destroying it, and then swerved back to its original path. To me, that said everything about what Israel was really up to there.

Rejectionists on both sides are to blame. The Oslo Peace Process could have forestalled all this violence, as Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin understood. But on the Israeli side, the then Likud Party of Bibi Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert derailed it. On the Palestinian side, Hamas rejected it. Had there been a peace process, prisoners would have been released in return for a cessation of hostilities, and there would have been no motivation to capture Israeli soldiers.

You have to go back not 6 months but 6 years to see how this started, and I don't think the PLO instigated it.

Al, you note that the tank was within an occupied city. Cars are weapons when loaded with high explosives, as we have seen demostrated all over the world. Destroying one makes perfect sense when you stop to think.

We'd better be willing to pay a high price for Bush's unwillingness to act evenhandedly in the dispute.

Israel's vastly disproportionate response to Hezbollah's hostage taking, combined with Bush's failure to restrain Israel, is guaranteed to ignite massive blow-back against us throughout the region.

That's essentially a tautology. Sure, if both sides agreed to and abided by truce there would be one. If they don't agree then there isn't one. No insight there. Meaningful analysis requires considering WHY the parties can't agree and what, if anything, the parties might be willing to do to achieve it.

The characterisation of the Hezbollah action as "unprovoked" is both grotesque and absurd. The cross-border raid by the Lebanese Shiite group comes after two weeks of escalating Israeli aggression in Gaza that has left more than 60 Palestinians dead. Moreover, Israel has never abandoned its territorial ambitions in Lebanon and Syria. To this day it has retained the Shebaa Farms, a 25 square-kilometre area of Lebanese agricultural land. It was captured by Israel in the 1967 war and again in 1973 and has been occupied ever since. The fate of Shebaa Farms is bound up with that of the much larger Golan Heights, which it is adjacent to. Formerly known as the Syrian Heights, the Golan Heights is a strategic plateau on the border of Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. It was captured by Israel in the 1967 war and again in 1973 and has been occupied ever since.

"The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced." "I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy." "The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond." "And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children." Osama Bin Ladin, 2004

Squeaky: Quoting a tautology and providing the link to where you find it makes it no less a banal tautology.

UNITED NATIONS - The United States cast the first U.N. Security Council veto in nearly two years Thursday, blocking an Arab-backed resolution that would have demanded Israel halt its military offensive in the Gaza Strip The draft, sponsored by Qatar, accused Israel of a "disproportionate use of force" that endangered Palestinian civilians, and it demanded Israel withdraw its troops from Gaza.

You probably havent noticed that there are many anti-Israel posts here that have not been deleted. It is possible to discuss this topice without hatred.

What would make the Palestinians happy short of the anihilation of Israel?

Sadly, in many people, the two overlap completely

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us.. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

"There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

"We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994p. 1]

One could string quotes together from prominent americans to paint the whole country as KKK. That would be about as true as the above post.

John Mann, I guess that we know where you stand

I am also guessing that if I linked together quotes from prominent Palestinians, you would have a fit.