” . . .but we are yet to discover a peaceful one.”

No we haven’t.

Are Egyptians idolaters?

Are modern Germans Nazis?

Are all Somalians al-Shabbab? If so you better tell them so they can stop being slaughtered by the same.

What happens when warfare slips from the conventions of columns, flags, and uniforms? That is part of what has happened. Mafia have crept into the sub-basement of the field: no uniforms, no nationality, many languages, no problem “blending in” until they’re comfortable in some space, and then the signal visual affectations arrive. They don’t get everybody either: they make enemies with every inch of ground claimed (by their own authority backed by the threat of unpredictable violence). I think the constituencies fed up with them and those aligned but doubtful should be helped to separate from them in every way possible.

PakDef just rolled up into Waziristan in an attempt to prosecute a conventional war by evacuating the entire space and going into kill who was left to resist (or not — some innocents couldn’t leave). On top of that travesty, they let the barbers get between their assault and the men with red beards. (Head slap with an “oy vey!” right there).

Military address the outer shell of this challenge — that’s how the checkpoints, fences, and walls and a lot of intelligence save lives — but stronger medicine is needed to combat some thought processes (which I distill as “gonna be safe locally” or “gonna get somethin'”) and armor against the seduction of delusional promises and pandering speech.

French, German, and Italian governments through their leaders without prompting repudiated in the past day Gaza-based anti-Semitic riots in their own spheres. The fathers and grandfathers and uncles or other relations of the same could well have been fascists or collaborators with the Nazis, but they are not that today.

When the machinery of war stopped moving, what happened?

People die of contagious disease too, but I think it much more evil when they do so — when they get others to do so — for some evil that dwells in language, preoccupies the imagination, and spills out into a hateful and violent presence in the world surrounding their own.

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FTAC.

End the Preoccupation (with Jews). They are not peacemakers where Hamas and others like them are involved: they are conflict sustaining. They are part of what keeps it going. Israel is the democracy in the neighborhood, the liberating force, the entity that listens with compassion and empathy, and the entity that knows self-restraint. That it has chosen to mobilize against a still genocidal political movement that has launched at it more than 8,000 rocket-enabled attempted murders comes almost as a surprise.

The way to freedom for the residents of Gaza (many of whom have been jailed and tortured by Hamas for political purposes) is to eject Hamas and its kind permanently. Then they will be able to speak for themselves without intimidation and with a broad palette of practical and representative paths. Hamas, many today Gaza millionaires with mansions (truly: Gaza has been made a victim of the “one percent”), has never had anything good to offer the refugees of 1948.

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