#Israel enters the #StarTrek phase of its war on Gaza

Israel's war with Gaza has gone beyond US drone strikes in trying to make war as "humanless" in some ways as possible.

When posting more briefly on Facebook, I started with the rhetorical line of,

Is there an app for that?

Israel said it sent text messages and phoned residents of northern Gaza — including Shijaiyah, the site of one of the war's bloodiest battles last week — urging them to flee their homes and move toward Gaza City.

What next, Eminiar VII in "A Taste of Armageddon"?

In case you don't remember that episode of the original "classic" Star Trek, it's about a centuries-old war between two planets in the same solar system.

It's lasted that long because it's waged by computers, and like super-neutron bombs, they "kill" people while not damaging property. The "kill" is in scare quotes, because people have to report to disintegration chambers to actually be killed. A couple of actual quotes will illustrate:

Anan 7: We have been at war for 500 years.
Captain James T. Kirk: You conceal it very well.

Obviously, Israel and Hamas would never reach an agreement about that. But, the text messaging is in that general direction. But, could they still be at war 450 years from now? Your guess is as good as mine.

Another quote from that Star Trek episode may illuminate:

Spock: [after hearing Anan 7 explain their system of computerized warfare] There is a certain scientific logic about it.
Anan 7: I'm glad you approve.
Spock: I do *not* approve. I *understand*. 

Exactly.

Meanwhile, will the fighting stop soon? Well, the US and EU are trying to stop it:

The United Nations on Monday called for an "immediate" cease-fire in the fighting and on Sunday, President Barack Obama called Netanyahu to push for an immediate end to the conflict.

This, though, is one of the cases where the old cliches about the word "try" are correct.

If Dear Leader were serious, he would take a page from Poppy Bush's book and freeze some of our foreign aid money to Israel.

But, as the Al-Jazeera leaks showed, his actual seriousness has been about freezing aid to Palestine and nobody else.