You say: "What's beyond dispute is that, if Israel wanted to inflict truly heavy civilian casualties, we could, any time. In fact, we could just bulldoze Gaza into the sea. We haven't."

Just because Israel could behave even worse that it's doing now does not make what it's doing now OK.

I don't know whether Israel is deliberately targeting civilians or not, but even if you take Israel at its word that it is not, it KNOWS, by the densely populated rat-trap that Gaza has become, there will be many innocent people killed and injured.

But they do it anyway.

It seems clear that the only thing that would stop this slaughter was if Israel felt it was losing the PR battle. But they are currently winning the battle in Israel and its sponsor the US, even if not in the rest of the world and the UN.

It's this that so dismays wishy-washy liberals like me: the large-scale loss of innocent Palestinian lives seems meaningless to most Israelis (and many Americans) and is a perfectly acceptable consequence of their actions.

You can't help asking yourself: what sort of people are these? Do they have no humanity?

"Where have you been for the last eight years? What have YOU done to stop the rocket fire?"

I personally have done nothing to stop the rocket fire and am in no position to do so. I know what I would NOT have done, which is inflict collective punishment on Gazans through daily personal humiliations, blockades, and now massive loss of life through bombings. I just cannot see how this would achieve anything apart from at best a short-term respite for Israelis from Hamas rockets, and further radicalizing Palestinians and their supporters, thus endangering Israel (and all the rest of us for that matter) even more.

I know the parallels are not exact, but I lived through the IRA campaigns in the mainland UK where IRA terrorists planted bombs in pubs and other public places, killing many innocent people (far more than have been killed by Hamas rockets as it happens). The British government did not exactly cover themselves in glory with their response to this, but bombing Belfast or Dublin would have been unthinkable.

"So what *would* you do, as a self-described wishy-washy liberal (I hope that was you:) to stop the rockets?"

What needs to be done to stop the rockets in the long-term would not stop them in the short-term. And that's a problem.

I know this is all hypotheticals, but bear with me. For a terrorist organization to thrive it must have significant support from the people it purports to be fighting for, e.g. Hamas and the Palestinians (who elected them), or the IRA and Irish and Irish/Americans, or the ANC and black South Africans, or Irgun and Zionist Jews. If you remove that support, the organization withers.

Hamas's anti-Israel rhetoric would be weakened if it could be demonstrated to ordinary Palestinians that Israel is not a direct threat to them and that some sort of two-state solution is possible in the near future. What's happening now in Gaza, of course, sends all hopes for peace back to the drawing board.

Israel could take a giant step in the right direction by rolling back its illegal settlements, ending the blockade of Gaza, and having serious negotiations with Hamas. And it would have to be Hamas as that's all there is at the moment (Fatah is dead and buried). It is possible for Hamas to negotiate themselves into becoming a more-or-less mainstream organization, as happened with Sinn Fein and the ANC.

I know this wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't stop Hamas in the short-term firing rockets into Israel. It might be very difficult to sell it politically to the Israeli (and American) electorate as it would be seen as 'rewarding' Hamas.

And it WOULD be a genuine concession by Israel, which I'm sure many Israelis would regard as a sign of weakness but in reality is a sign of strength - a belief in your own future.

I'm at work and don't have time for endless circular arguments.

Whatever the solution to the Israel/Palestine problem might turn out to be, the one thing that you can be absolutely sure of is that endless war won't get you there.

Israel seems to share with the US establishment the view that the way to achieve peace and put a stop to war is TO WIN ALL THE WARS.

This won't work.

I've never heard about any secret bombings carried out by the British secret service in Ireland, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if dirty tricks were used to discredit 'the other side'. The South African secret service did the same thing to discredit the ANC.

If true, the point is that it was SECRET. The British government would have known this was a shameful and illegal act and, if they had been found out, would have been rightly condemned round the world AND THROUGHOUT BRITAIN. The Israeli government, on the other hand, is quite open about their bombings of Palestinians, and this is cheered on by most Israelis and Americans.

There's something morally abhorrent about that.