There's a heated and informative discussion going on over at Hobbs Online about the nature and future of the Israeli/Palestinian war. Here's my most recent comment (slightly edited post hoc):
There may be numerically many Palestinians who want peace, but the majority of them do not, if the poll numbers I cited are even remotely accurate.
It's a war. Don't misunderstand my position: I don't merely want peace, I want Israel to win. Firstly, I don't think there will be peace until one side or the other has a decisive victory. Look at history. No one ever gives up fighting until they have to. Given that, I want Israel to be the winners, and the Palestinians to be the losers.
As long as the conflict stays low-level, it's never going to end, because no one will win.
Yes, it sucks that innocent people are getting killed, but you're living in fantasyland if you think the fighting is just going to stop without victory by one side or the other.
There's an immense difference between purposefully targeting civilians, and accidentally killing civilians while targeting soldiers. It's widely accepted that if soldiers hide among civilians, and those civilians are killed while the soldiers are being attacked, the attackers are not responsible for the civilian deaths. The soldiers who hide among the civilians are directly responsible. That's how war works.
Similarly, the WTC was not a military target, it was a civilian target. There were no military units hiding among the civilians there. Arguably the Pentagon was a military target, and I think it's kinda odd that the plane that hit the Pentagon wasn't shot down. But then, at that point, we didn't realize that we were in a war.
In WW2 the fighting didn't stop until our opponents had no other choice. The carpet bombing of German cities and the nuking of Japan weren't incidental to our victory, they were essential. If the Palestinian terrorists did not have the support of the Palestinian people, they could not carry on their fight, any more than the German and Japanese armies could have continued fighting on their own.
If you want true, lasting peace, you should be pushing for a quick and clean victory for Israel.
Update:
Uh oh, Hamas says the cease-fire is over. I hope they don't start blowing up buses! Oh wait, they were already doing that during the cease-fire.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israel killed a senior Hamas political leader in a missile strike Thursday, two days after a suicide bombing of a bus in which 20 people died, including six children. Hamas, along with Islamic Jihad, formally abandoned a truce declared eight weeks ago.Formal, informal, whatever. No one is really in charge of these groups, and no one can really negotiate for them with any authority.
I think Cox & Forkum understand the Palestinians pretty well.
Maybe I'm misreading, but it sounds like you're calling for genocide, whether you realize it or not. Since the Palestinian people support the terrorists, our only option is to kill lots of Palestinian people so that they're not supporting the terrorists? What would qualify as a "quick and clean victory for Israel"?
And wouldn't educating the non-terrorist Palestinians be a better method? Since obviously they only support the terrorists because they're ignorant of what they should really be doing, if the people learn better, they'll stop supporting the terrorists, and the "war" will be over anyway. Surely sending a hundred million dollars a year worth of educational funds to Palestine (with proper oversight, to make sure it isn't co-opted for terrorist usage) would be a better value than giving six billion dollars of military funding to Israel each year. I mean, heck, we could do both, and as the level of terrorism goes down due to the increased education level, we could scale back on funding Israel's military, too.
I'm not saying Israel should kill them all. I'm saying that the world should stop acting as if there's not a war going on. Israel needs to fight to win, not just fight to maintain a stalemate.
Could WW2 have been won by educating the Germans and Japanese? Some disagreements simply cannot be solved without violence. It's sad, but it's part of the human condition.