Reality and platitudes.

 Years ago, mostly on neo-hippy cars, I'd see bumper stickers that said; "Free Tibet".  The same cars would be festooned and bedecked with all sorts of liberal stickers, such as "Save the whales" and the like.

In the real world freeing Tibet would take a military effort of gigantic proportions, if not an outright nucelar war.

You can choose to deal with reality, but anyway you look at it, reality is going to deal with you.

There's a lot of unrealistic thinking going on regarding the current Hamas Israel War outside the country.

One thing that we're seeing a lot of are pleas that Israel not do anything that harms average Palestinians.  More sophisticated thinkers, which most of these people are not, would argue the law of proportionality, which is that a violent armed effort against you does not invite a disproportionate response.

To put it uncomfortably for Americans, the Japanese attacking a U.S. Navy installation at Pearl Harbor does not invite murdering thousands of people through a nuclear device.

Having said that, nations, like people, have a right to self-defense, and Hamas clearly intends to murder the Jews in Israel.

They have to address that, and therefore they have to address Hamas. That means they have to go into Gaza and that action will kill civilians no matter what.

The real world.

I'm glad that I'm not the one who has to try to balance the moral scale here.  Some will argue that the solution is to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza, but that would be wrong.  Some would argue that the solution is to resume the administration of Gaza to preclude it from reviving as a terrorist enclave.  Is that wrong?

And in terms of right and wrong, it's interesting how the appeal is largely from people in Christian societies regarding a largely Islamic society.  Overall, concerns that the response will be disproportionate came from Christians, Christian influenced people, and Jews.  There isn't very much Islamic concern about proportionality.  Rather, it's "we've been occupied . . . " which is an accusation against an Israeli punitive action by a terrorist intervention done on their behalf, which they seem reluctant at best to disavow.  On the ground, Islamic societies aren't doing anything obvious to make this better.  They aren't opening their borders to Palestinians impacted by the war. Iran is threatening to "become involved" in the war which they went a long ways to helping bring about.

None of this is a reason not to be concerned, let alone to pray for peace, but it's also not a excuse to consider the grim realities of this sitaution.