Opinion

I'm reading essentially two different points of view concerning the Israeli war with Hamas in the Gaza.

What I'm seeing is that extremely reasonable and intelligent people support either position and then defend their position with appropriate information.

The positions are the attack is justified versus the attacks are not justified because they place too many people in harms way.

We know these two positions and we know how our view of either one becomes more and more solidified over time. Once we establish a position, we place our entirety behind it. This is the way things work. We like to be right and we like to have clear justification for our position.

What we essentially have here are two positions that can't seem to be reconciled, right. Hamas lobbing missiles into Israel is wrong and Israel needs to defend itself appropriately. Also through the act of defending itself, Israel is enacting a significantly greater toll on innocent Palestinians, and no matter what, this is simply not good and in the long run probably does not stop future attacks.

So we are caught in this intractable situation where we have to defend our position and its emotional, its salient, its highly important to us.

Where is there some resolution.

Clearly Israel needs to defend itself from attack, this is fundamental, unquestionable. So then we get into the method that Israel uses to defend itself. Can we be critical of Israel's intensity in leveling parts of the Gaza - yes, of course we can.

We need to remove our inability to not see the equal right of all parties to exist. Now we come up with well Hamas does not want Israel to exist and then retreat into our position again. So look at history, and look to see if there were any other situations where this type of unyielding position exhausted itself over time.

We know what happens in war. You get some crazy people in there and their basic sadistic nature turns the thing into a bloodbath. Its brutal, its not human behavior. Is any military exempt from this - get real.

So I still maintain this position. Israel needs to stop Hamas missile attacks yet they need to be more precise and selective about how they intervene and remove this threat.

In the meanwhile, this position, is moot. Its not changing anything. The outcome continues along a very harsh line. Ask yourself this question, will the missile attacks cease once the Israeli operation ceases.