As best I understand it, the middle east nomadic tribal tradition was to continue feuds for generations of low-level raiding, until one combatant finally was able to totally defeat the other, or some external event changed the situation. Their ideas of conflict resolution are cultural.

As human beings, east and west can understand each other well in some areas, yet in other areas we each are confounded by the thinking of the other.

To keep trying the same actions and expect different results is one definition of insanity. If the parties are using different rules, it’s time to change all the rules. We have tried the old way enough times to expect the results to be predictable.

And I don’t see that we have any obligation to pretend not to discriminate. Israel is an ally. If that word means anything, the US is on Israel’s side, and Israel is not at fault here. Why bend over backward to pretend otherwise? We want to act in reasonable and considered ways, but at this point, nothing we could do would change the feelings of those who detest us. Our image in the middle east is pretty much a lost cause, and should not be a serious consideration.

How do you make terrorists stop killing? And which countries are you referring to when you say “from otherwise peaceable countries”?

Though my heart goes out to those whose lives are being destroyed, I wrote my comment not out of pity, but rather out of a sense of responsibility to take a stand for God’s laws, the first of which is “Thou shalt not kill”. The question I always ask when I see what I consider over-reaching beyond-defense destruction is, “Where were the German people when Hitler began to ‘eradicate’ whole populations?’ Were the Germans watching Hitler’s destructive force and sitting on their hands diverting themselves with pondering about models for successful eradication of whomever the ‘enemy’ was at the time?

So, Alan, I am trying to say that there is something more important to me than ‘protection’. I cannot control what others do, including what terrorists do, or what Israel does to combat terrorism. But I do have control and responsibility over whether I compromise my own soul by sitting silent, or worse yet, scurrying about to ‘justify’ through a ‘new model’ the breaking of God’s laws. That ‘new model’ might bring a ‘peace’ solution for Israel in the same way the ‘eradicating the Jews’ was the ‘answer’ that was supposed to benefit Hitler’s Germany.

Instead of enacting social policies of inclusion and accomodation, Europe has been exporting its adventurers, socio-economically deprived and dissidents to other global at the expense of indigenous populations for centuries. The genocidal holocausts resulting from this practice have produced suffering among innocents in number and degree that belies any claim that the suffering of European Jews might make as to historically unique victimization.

If the Euro-Jewish holocaust and the pogroms and discrimination that preceeded it provide the principal rationale for a separate Jewish state, then it is Europeans, not Palestinians, who owe the debt of land for the blood of slaughtered innocents.

I am a descendent of European social malcontents currently residing on land which for thousands of years was inhabited by Native American tribes that for the most part have been marginalized or driven to extinction. Furthermore, I am the descendent of Celts, Normans, Saxons and who knows what else: that is, groups that did their best at various points in history to enslave, oppress and wipe each other out.

As unfair as I believe it is that Israel was established where it has been, it has managed, with a great deal of U.S. assistance, to become to militarily too powerful to be dislodged, absent unthinkable acts of warfare.

We really need to recast our thinking about Israel and its geographical neighborhood.