Israel has gone over the top and is pursuing a counterproductive policy which will not enhance its security in the long term. Its military operations have no validity whatever as a strategic operations and have all the aspects of revenge attacks and punishment details. There is only negative propaganda value in massive civilian casualties, among them large numbers of women and decapitated children. The warnings to civilians to leave their homes are little more than a cruel torment when Israel knows perfectly well that in overcrowded Gaza they have nowhere to go. Israel is now without any friends in the nations in the world bar one, the United States, which is close to getting fed up as well. The State of Israel teeters on the edge of moral bankruptcy.
It has nothing to do with being Jewish. Almost everything it is does is in violation of all the high principles and humanitarian traditions of Judaism. It is to do with the difference between being a fully paid member of the family of civilised nations and a rogue state which does whatever it likes. Of course Israel has a right to defend itself, but that right is progressively degraded if it has itself created the very conditions which cause its security to be threatened.
Occupying large tracts of other people’s land and refusing to accept any peace proposals which to do not involve capitulation by the enemies which it has in sixty years of conflict itself created, sealing of all access in an out of Gaza so that the essentials of life have to be smuggled through tunnels burrowed into the earth, forcing a rat like existence and which guarantee that those very tunnels will be used also to smuggle arms and weapons, builds with forensic efficiency the very threats Israel then has to defending itself against. The United Nations is often split on major issues but on the censure of Israel for its current operations, the condemnation is unanimous.
The people of Israel and their government have to take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror of reason and see that they cannot go on like this. Their future lies not in everlasting fear and fighting but in negotiating a settlement which guarantees their security and gives their neighbours a civilised life in a place they can call their own. This is what the world gave the Jewish people when it inaugurated the state of Israel after WWII. To secure that achievement Israel must now recognise once and for all that the rights it has been given by its very existence are not exclusive to it, but are shared by all humanity and must be honoured by all civilised countries. The days when Israel could claim exception on whatever pretext are well and truly over.