I listen to the evening news of the Middle East conflict between Palestine and Israel, and I just have to shake my head. The Palestinians sue for peace because they are on the losing side of the conflict – outmatched militarily and economically. They are at the mercy of a power quite capable of reducing their cities to rubble and depriving the Palestinian people of food, water, and medicine. The side that typically pleads for peace is the side that wants to end a conflict short of unconditional surrender, I have read.
Curiously, Netanyahu and his political coalition are interested in nothing but unconditional surrender. This seems to me an irrational position since it suggests that the military/political adversary, Hamas, can be vanquished in order to give Israel a guarantee that there will be no future incursions. Any such guarantee is an illusion. No country, not even one armed with nuclear weapons, is immune from potential attack. And, with each Israeli expedition to rescue a handful of hostages at an associated toll of hundreds of Palestinians, including children, and perhaps twice as many wounded, Israel is surely creating future Hamas recruits.
You can kill soldiers, their commanders, their political leaders, and even the civilian population of a country or ethnicity, but you can’t kill their outrage, their sense of injustice, and their beliefs. The irony is that no group should know that better than the Jewish people.
I think that we humans sometimes either learn the wrong lessons from history or learn nothing at all.