CLEARING AND STRIVING

 Let's start by busting one all-too-common assumption.
The 'Palestinians' are not guiltless. Not at all.
The earliest mass murder of Jews which I remember reading about in Eretz Israel took place in 1834. I believe it was in Safed. There might have been a pogrom in Hebron at about the same time.
This was when most Jews in Europe still had faith in assimilation and the Jews living among their Muslim/Arab cousins were viewed as were 'common n***ers' in the Jim Crow USA as a whole, not to mention the Jim Crow South as the heart of that evil mindset and practice!
And that mentality is still all too prevalent among Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, in that part of the Middle East. Arabs only started speaking of 'Palestine' in 1968, after Israel won it all in the Six-Day War.
One Arab said in 1938, "This is our land, it is South Syria, and the Jews are our dogs."
Not to mention the uncharged war criminal who was Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, who helped Hitler and hoped to build extermination camps in the Dothan valley. Or Zahir Muhsein, who in a 1977 interview for Trouw magazine, admitted that all the talk of 'liberating Palestine' was just that: talk. He, too, referred to the area as 'South Syria'. And Hamas has to be utterly destroyed.
The really tough question is, is Israel acting in such a way as to do that successfully? And so far, no one I know has a really satisfactory answer. Making Gaza itself into a bigger pile of rubble than it was already seems to have a very limited utility, especially since too many of the cowards who lead Hamas, and their families, are safely and luxuriously ensconsed in plush hotels or apartments in Qatar.
Yes, I know that if someone is determined to kill you, your whole family and all your neighbors, there is nothing for it but to kill them first. But is there no better way of determining who is who than killing them all and, as an infamous shirt says, letting God sort 'em out? I would really hope there is!
For example, has anyone thought about putting together a caravan which would supply power to the Gazan hospitals--especially the ones with neonates in ICU and/or dialysis machines? As heavily armed as they might need to be?
Speaking of neonates, I personally think that Israel ought to copy something done by the native peoples here, while the frontier was along the Alleghenies: the natives used to take young children of the settlers and raise them as their own. According to Parkman, when Bouquet demanded those abductees be returned--not a single one returned to white society willingly! Not one!
Jews and Arabs are cousins. If Israel were to do this, would it give pause to genocidal maniacs made drunk on bad religion; the idea that the IDF soldiers might include some of their own children?
And, after all, Israel is the natives' state and Arabs are the 'settlers' in this case.
This is one time I wish there was a REAL Jewish Laser Squad, Mazel Tough and all! Maybe lasers could find and kill Hamas members and sympathizers with far more precision than bombs. At least, I'd imagine so.
And what about encouraging ways of building peace from the ground up? I have heard of such groups and that they've had at least some success. How can we help in doing that?
I see two things at work here: Christendom and Islam both need to get used to Jews not being helpless victims anymore but actually winning battles and, yes, wars as well. And Israel needs to stay where it is without putting its national soul in serious danger. I suspect that has been a bad side-effect of having been, willy-nilly, an occupying power of sorts for the last 56 years and that a full-scale ground assault on Gaza might well aggravate it.
Maybe we all need to think again of the meaning of the name 'Israel': they that have striven with God and men and have prevailed. I know that Israel has a hard road before it, but I also believe that God has faith that Israel can not only walk it but improve on it. And let those who yell, "Submit! Submit! Submit!" take notice and grease the dusty wheels of their spirituality with those improvements.