I know I wrote about my taking rockets and bombs bursting on Israeli towns personally.  Uri Dromi wrote today in the Miami Herald about the absurdity of this continuing day after day even though Hamas seems to want to talk about it. The reality is that the Israelis are caught in a catch 22 situation.  The Hamas “heroic fighters” hide among the civilian population in Gaza so the Israeli military have to be picky about their targets while they retaliate or not retaliate at all but show “restraint”.

Dromi reports an interesting solution to the constant stream of rockets and mortars.  He says the idea is to have a sensor rigged up to tell when a rocket from the Gazan side was fired, that a corresponding Israeli rocket would be immediately and indiscriminately fired back.  My intellectual friends who deplore Israel’s right to exist would recoil with horror if this was put into action.  The Israelis, according to my friends, would still be wrong for being where they are – I guess they mean all of Israeli land is Palestinian to begin with and Israel must go into the sea.

Rose Mary Sheldon writes me to say that when she was in Israel she was in the middle of rocket attacks and wished she had a gun to go and fight back.  But that was not in the cards.  She is now the head of the History Dept at VMI.

Now, I cannot see how the descendants of those folks in the Revolutionary War are different from the folks in Israel who have to bear attacks by rockets and mortars sent by other folks who cannot be held to account for the misery those missiles cause.  Was our War of Independence any different from the war of Israel’s independence that continues from before 1948 to this day?  I do not think so.

But, in all wars there are many sides and many different impulses that put people under arms and do all kinds of proscribed things.  The only difference between other wars and the one in the Middle East is that the Islamic opinion says that “It is just too bad that Israel decided to become a state on Palestinian property”. So, because the United Nations (quite different today from when it was formed) has invited so many new states who oppose Israel’s right to exist is incapable from doing the right thing.

The United Nations should not take sides, which it has. The U.S. which has taken the side of Israel is, along with Great Britain, friendly to the notion that the warring parties sit down at the same table. They should discuss their problems without the interference of the huge presence of the Islamic world that automatically decries and decrees that Israel be driven into the sea to match the maps they use to teach their children about the “Holy Land”.