I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion. I am curious what people (and you) would recommend an army do if the other side put babies in car seats on top of their panzers. Would you blow up the tanks or say, “We can’t kill the babies. We will play defense instead”? Or is there another answer? I ask honestly because I don’t know and I curious.

It seems that Hamas was deeply ingrained in Gaza, and it seems that Israel’s demands were actually pretty simple: give the hostages back and surrender. In just about any other time in history if a force had killed that many people, it was customary to retaliate by destroying the whole city, burning it down, and potentially wiling out the entire population. The US even did it in the 40s to Dresden. Of course they also did it in Japan with Little Boy and Fat Man.

It seems people are trying to impose a contemporary mortality to a situation that historically was always handled one way. And that way was literally to kill everyone and destroy everything. I prefer the contemporary morality. It’s also not clear that Hamas is open to that. The line “they should know when they’re conquered” from the movie Gladiator comes to mind.

War is never a good answer. I still haven’t heard a good explanation of what people think Israel should do. Is destroying buildings the problem or is destroying buildings in addition to doing other things the problem?