What else could Israel do? What did Britain do when attacked by terrorists in the period 1969 - 1999?

Images on the TV screen of the dark days Israel is currently passing through brought back memories of a similar time in my country's past when we faced unrelenting terrorist assault and were forced to respond as Israel has.

For twenty, thirty years, British - mainly English - cities were bombed by IRA terrrorists. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Warrington, Brighton, Guildford. Innocent civilians were slaughtered and maimed by the terrorist bombs planted in shops, pubs, bus stop litter bins, buses. Missiles landed in the back garden of Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher herself narrowly missed death in the hotel at Brighton when it was blasted by a massive bomb. Several did die at the time,others were paralysed and had limbs torn from their bodies. British soldiers were murdered in their barracks. These terrorists operated from, and would flee back to, the Republic of Ireland where they had stockpiles of weaponry, and where they were safe from extradition to the UK due to the bias of the Irish courts and the half hearted and ineffective measures taken by the ROI government against the terrorists. The terrorists were motivated by anger against injustices supposedly perpetrated by the British in a part of the island of Ireland the terrorists claimed should not be British. How did the UK government respond? How similar it all seems to the current plight of Israel, falsely accsed of unrelenting oppression of the Palestinians and seizure of their lands. And hoe similar was Britain's response to the twenty years of IRA terrorist outrage.

Do you remember how the RAF bombed Dublin airport? How the Royal Navy effected a blockade of Rosslare and Cobh and Dun Laoghaire and other ports? How the British Army attacked with tanks and artillery in massive force from the North, first scattering leaflets to the populations of Drogheda and Dundalk and the rural areas all the way down to the Boyne, warning the local population that it should evacuate the region and move to safety in Cork and Galway and Limerick? How schools and hospitals and factories were flattened, villages razed , roads cratered, bridges pulverised, TV statios wrecked, churches reduced to rubble, all due to the shelling from British artillery across the border and bombardment by the RAF from the air? Do you remember the relentless assault, night after night, day by day, on the infrasructure of Ireland? Do you remember the "collateral damage" - the dead, the maimed, the traumatised? Do you remember the dramatic scenes from the docksides at Rosslare and Dun Laoghaire as thousands of panicked foreign nationals - Americans and French and Swedes and Dutch - waited anxiously to board the rescue ships allowed by the Royal Navy to pass through the blockade? Do you remember the mass graves of the casualties at Drogheda, the expanses of South Dublin flattened, the face of the UN representative touring in shocked horror round the ruins and muttering about war crimes? Do you remember the evisceration of Ireland, the wrecking of its economy, the assault on its people? Do you remember the talk of possibly extending the attacks to Boston and New York where our intelligence had revealed the real leaders of the terrorists were - the men from whom Adams and McGuinness took their orders and by whom they were manipulated in their evil war against freedom and democracy and all sacred ideals that we hold dear? And do you remember how successful this policy was in solving once and for all the problem of Irish terrorism, the Final Solution.......?

Of course, there was condemnation around the world of the Iron Lady's ordering this devastating scorched earth policy by the combined might of the army, navy and air force of the foremost military power in the EU against a small defenceless neighbouring country. But we know this was justified, don't we? We know we had the right to defend ourselves. We know that in the War against Terror, all means should be employed in extirpating and exterminating and destroying the scourge of terrorism. The whole country was united behind the Iron Lady. Our response to IRA provocation was justified. What else could we have done? Our response was proportional and justified.

What else could we do?

What else could we do?

What else could Israel do........?

Yet Saddam Hussein is on trial for war crimes for suppressing an uprising. So it seems that you support crimes against humanity when they are performed by certain parties but not by others. Perhaps someone should publish a list of those parties that are allowed to bomb civilians so that the rest of us would know when our protests are inappropriate. That list might also be helpful to those civilians being bombed so that, fo instance, the Lebonese being bombed out of their homes, or losing family members to Israeli bombs will be less likely to be sympathetic to Hezbollah, or to join in the fight against Israel.