Consider: You have an enemy on your border that daily preaches and advocates your complete destruction, and MEANS it. And they are launching a barrage of rockets, daily, for weeks, against you. (The effectiveness of their targetting devices hardly matters.) Their television and radio and media are filled with vicious assaults against the very nature of your people. If they could, they would murder every single one of you.

If you were a sovereign nation fully committed to the safety of your own people, if you were to declare war against this enemy, it would have to be total war. The propaganda must be driven underground – any media outlet of any sort preaching the hate must be bombed. Any school known to be preaching the hate must be shut down and then reduced to rubble. For any known militants engaged in politics or military action, you must attempt to kill them. Every known target must be attacked. Why does everyone over there think that the public propaganda is safer than underground propaganda? Of course you drive them underground; you make them the skulkers, the furtive conspiracists. Let them discuss it in hate-filled voices in their living rooms. Not publicly.

This is war against an enemy, and Israel is making the classic mistake of not realizing that. I cannot believe that fifty years of “minor tactics” against the radical Palestinians has gained Israel anything – generations have grown up under these minor conflicts, which are guaranteed to keep the flames of hate at a furious burn. But a people get the government they deserve, and until the Israeli people truly do unite and make it clear that they want the radicalized Palestinians defeated – which means driven underground, reduced from public power, and reduced in number, and thereafter constantly under threat – the Israelis won’t do it, and the endless conflict will endlessly continue.

Finally, a maxim: To refuse to apply justice to the guilty is to harm the innocent.
Mercy does not mean allowing the guilty to roam free. Mercy reduces the punishment once the guilty have been apprehended, once their predations have ceased. Israel continues to make terrible mistakes in these decades-long, endless quarter-measures against their avowed enemies that seek the total destruction of Israelis. For eventually they shall become strong enough to murder all Israelis – that IS what they do want, after all – and what then?

I think that the “timetable” (What? Is this a railroad?) issue is a variation on the “I just want to understand” plea from your sweetheart. You know immediately that there is no chance of a correct or pleasing response and the interrogatory torture will continue until you expire or un-ass the area.

Smite them, hip and thigh. Repeat.

I don’t see any other reasonable analysis.

Ironically, what may push them is confirmation of the rumor that The One is thinking of placing Israel under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. So, if Iran attacks Israel with atomic bombs, it will precipitate a devastating American retaliation.

Here are the two problems with that scenario:

1. Israel will probably be destroyed in an attack by an Iran that has been allowed to develop nukes. The threat of retaliation will have made no difference.

2. The U.S. “nuclear umbrella” will be administered by a chickenshit metrosexual Democrat who has no stomach for war. Since Israel will have been eliminated as a source of irritation for all right-thinking people, The One will reason, to global applause, that there’s no point in avenging the Jooos.

So, Israel will finally realize that it’s on its own. Pushing hard against Hamas will not only eliminate one implacable foe, it will signal to Iran and the world that Israel is finally getting serious and that it is ramping up for some hard-core steps. This means taking out what it can of the Iranian nuclear installations.

Since Bush and Obama have already signaled that Iran is free to develop nukes, Israel is our last hope for stopping it.

And that’s perfectly fine with the Left.

The war ends when one side’s ability to fight or resist further has been eliminated.

Anything less is BS, tic-tac-toe, and matchstick games. The continued running sore of Israeli relations with Hizbollah, Hamas, the PLO and the rest of the recurring gangs of murderous jackasses that surround them has been proving the “value” of half measures for sixty years.

You bomb them flat, kill their power, shut off their milkman, close their stores, and END it. Then, should you feel like it, you give the collateral damage a nice funeral – though that is the mark of housebroken people and not strictly necessary. But you END it.

We haven’t had the stomach for that, apparently, since 1945. Israel is apparently losing their stomach for it.

This will not accrue positively to either our future, or Israel’s.

The Dems, Truman, and Korea was the first time we did the giveup and quit thing.

(Has anybody looked to see how well Korea worked out? We are still there.)

And I might be wrong–it might have been when Eisenhower was told to let the other leftists take Berlin.