Israel asserts right to defend itself

Nobody with a conscience can look at the images of destruction and human suffering on the streets of Gaza without flinching. The pictures of the civilian victims of Israeli air strikes – especially children – are heart-rending. But let's keep straight whose fault this tragedy is: Hamas, the fanatical Islamists who rule Gaza and who have used the land as a launching pad for firing rockets into Israel.

In 2005, Israel withdrew its military and Israeli settlers from occupied Gaza and turned the land over to the Palestinians. Fearing that Gaza would become a terror base, Israel retained control over the flow of goods and people into Gaza. The next year, Gazans voted in Hamas – a terrorist organization whose charter commits itself to the destruction of Israel and the demonization of Palestinian peacemakers.

After the Hamas takeover, Israel imposed restrictions on goods and people entering and leaving Gaza, out of a well-founded fear that Hamas would turn Gaza into a terror statelet. That they have done, despite Israel's vigilance. Since 2005, Hamas and other Gazan terrorists have fired more than 6,000 rockets into Israel.

No state can permit its citizens to live under that kind of mortal threat, as President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged during the campaign. Israel is acting in self-defense. Yes, the Israelis have inflicted far more casualties on the Gazans than the Gazans have on them, but that is because Hamas deliberately and evilly locates its military resources among civilians, cynically hoping for a propaganda victory.

Don't forget that Israel is committed to a peace process and a two-state solution. Hamas despises both. There can be no peace as long as Hamas is a player. And yet, the violence Israel brings against Hamas threatens to undermine its own long-term regional position. The short-term goal has to be returning to a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza – without, one hopes, the jihadists of Hamas.

Someday and somehow, the peace process must resume. May the next American president have more luck on this front than the current one did.