"Courage".

It wasn't. It was perceived as, and was, violence.

Netanyahu will win next year's Israeli elections, and Hamas will win next year's Palestinian.

Shortly, earnest escalations will occur on Israel's part. (Olmert's are genuinely intended to be defensive. Netanyahu's will not be.)

The Palestinians in the West Bank would be incrementally pushed out. Absent UN INVOLVEMENT, Netanyahu would/will expand the settlement program, and as individual settlement fingers become exposed, he will "defensively" annex the areas that threaten the settlements. Step by step, until there is NO West Bank Palestine, no Palestine anywhere.

Iran will not enter the fracas without risking nuclear war, which it would lose, as it does not have nukes yet, and will not in the time period that annexation and escalation occurs.

And, when war comes, the US will stand with Israel, as will most of Europe, having been the brunt of escalated terror (which will force it to regard jihadist Islam as a worse enemy than they already do).

The logic of appeasement (YES< THAT word) will appeal to many in Europe and the US, but it will NOT be a successful strategy.

The option of renunciation in involvement is NOT courage. It is renunciation of responsibility.

The question for the US, is HOW to be involved. HOW to help.

At the time of the vote the body count was 33.3 Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Most of the Palestinian victims were civilians,and many children died. I can understand the high Palestinian casualties IF it’s true that they fire from civilian areas, BUT why are the Israeli casualties so low considering Hamas is supposedly targeting civilian areas?

Gaza is cut off from Israel and from the surrounding arab countries by land and by sea, they rely on Israel (using UN & USA money) for their barest needs in food, water, electricity, and employment. Each time Israel cuts off fuel, the Palestinians do without. When Israel cut offs electricity, then they sit in the dark. Whenever Israel shuts the border, then the Palestinians don’t go to work. And so on.

By Anthony Weiss
Wed. Mar 05, 2008

A new study is challenging the notion that American Jews are growing less attached to Israel.

According to a study released by three researchers at the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, a prominent demographic research center at Brandeis University, an analysis of survey data going back more than a decade suggests that American Jewish attachment to Israel has remained consistently strong.

“Things seem to be pretty stable,” said Leonard Saxe, who is the institute’s director and one of the authors of the study.

Written by Saxe, Theodore Sasson and Charles Kadushin, the study comes in the wake of recent publications — including a survey conducted by sociologist Steven M. Cohen — arguing that American Jewish attachment to Israel is decreasing. More broadly, it is the latest in a long series of demographic studies and articles that have vacillated between optimism and pessimism over Jewish population size, attachment to Israel, Jewish affiliation among the children of intermarried couples and a whole host of other issues concerning the future of the Jewish community.

The Steinhardt Institute was founded in 2005 to settle precisely these kinds of contentious demographic issues; however, the institute, with Saxe as its director, has instead emerged as the consistently more optimistic pole in these debates.

The recent boom of interest in Jewish demographics can be traced to the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which found that 52% of Jews who were marrying took non-Jewish spouses. This number induced panic about the future of Jews in America, though several critics — Cohen included — argued that the number was inflated.

Then, the 2000-01 NJPS, co-authored by Cohen, found that the number of Jews in America had dropped to 5.2 million from 5.5 million in 1990. This number, too, was challenged: Not long ago, Saxe and Kadushin argued in a recent study that the number was likely more than 6 million and possibly as high as 8 million, depending on how one defined “Jewish.”

As of late, Saxe and Cohen, a research professor of Jewish social policy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, have clashed over the significance of intermarriage, with Cohen arguing that intermarriage leads to an erosion of Jewish identity and Saxe countering that it is Jewish background, not intermarriage, that is the truer measure of whether Jews stay Jewishly involved.

The tiff over attachment to Israel is the latest clash between the two. In 2007, Cohen and Ari Kelman, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, published a study showing that attachment to Israel was lower and lower among younger and younger non-Orthodox Jews. From this, Cohen and Kelman concluded that as the younger, less-attached group aged, Jews overall would become less attached.

Now, Saxe, Sasson and Kadushin are challenging that finding. Their study, which looks at telephone surveys commissioned by the American Jewish Committee going back to 1994, found that levels of attachment to Israel among American Jews had consistently remained high through the years, with those saying they felt “close” to Israel remaining well over 65%.

They also find that the so-called “age cohort” differences between younger and older Jews have been consistent through the years, suggesting that as Jews age, their attachment to Israel grows.

Cohen, however, refused to concede that Israel attachment is stable, saying that the AJCommittee’s surveys weren’t an accurate reflection of American Jews at large and that the study didn’t show the long-term effects of intermarriage. He defended his demographic pessimism, saying, “I think I’m in a bit better touch with the reality.”

Saxe, on the other hand, defended himself as a “tough-minded empiricist” and said that with the rise of new technology, easier travel to Israel and the huge numbers of young adults traveling to Israel through the Birthright Israel program, which began in 2000, the elements were in place for attachments to grow much stronger.

“We think something fundamental is changing,” he said.

Gaza shares a border with Egypt.

The intent of a military operation to protect civilians from shelling from a former "nation", is justifiable, defensive in nature.

The intent of a random assault solely at targeted civilians is murder.

That you would FAIL to distinguish is sickening.

That was meant to be "absent US involvement"

That was meant to be "absent US involvement"