The Germans did not stop Hitler, and they paid the price. That's how our species rolls.

The Palestinian Arabs have had 75 years to make peace literally and metaphorically with the presence of Israel. They had next door to them an example of what prosperity through modern education looks like. They chose instead to make war or tolerate leaders who would do so for them. That is on them. A people gets the government it deserves. The Palestinian Arabs got HAMAS. That's not Israel's fault.

It's all well and good to talk about the "Occupier" as if Gaza were France in 1941. But words do not make facts. Israel is now the Occupant, not the Occupier. The Palestinians can make peace, or they can die not trying.

Hostage taking and using your own loved ones as human shields cannot be allowed to succeed as a strategy. If the abductees become collateral damage, that will add to the travesty committed by HAMAS, but it should not change Israeli strategy. If you kill my son and hide behind yours, I do not say "Well played!" and go home. I kill you and anyone you put in the way.

I am not defending Israel's "right to exist." I am not even addressing the righteousness of Palestinian revanchism. I am saying that the Palestinians are making the wrong strategic decision. The people who got to America before the Europeans resisted for a while, but they eventually realized that they were outgunned. Most have been assimilated into American life, others have remained outside it. But we do not have "Indian uprisings" anymore. The Normans conquered England, and the Franks conquered Gaul. And so it goes.