I love hearing the local extremist radio station KPFA from the hate-and-vomit capital of America, Berkeley. KPFA news broadcasts from Gaza and can go for a half hour decrying the massacres the Israelis are carrying out on children and old women. Everyone interviewed seems to translate into the same statement that the Israelis kill children and old women because they are occupiers and oppressors.
This is a powerful reminder; not that these Arabs are idiots for failing to see what they do to cause the Israeli reaction, but because nearly all people believe that they are right and the enemy is wrong.
The law of warfare, based on several thousand years, is that wars end when enough blood has been shed and the loser knows there is nothing more to do. Most recently, the Germans and Japanese only surrendered when millions of their civilians had been killed, and not before then.
So why don't the Israelis kill a quarter of the Palestinian population and put an end to the 100 year war? Every military man in history would have done that.
The answer is that the Israelis are bound by some moral code that requires them to protect the thousands of spies they have among the Palestinians. Therefore we get a war where spies permit Israelis to single out terrorists and terrorist leaders for execution while leaving most of the hate filled population untouched.
I don't think the current strategy is working.