Idiotic, futile, and a guaranteed formula for defeat and disaster:

Hamas lacks the technology to aim its rockets. They’re taking potshots. In response, the Israeli government launched air strikes that have now killed more than 280 Palestinians, injured hundreds beyond that, and further radicalized thousands in the Occupied Territories and millions in the region. The response will not come today, of course. It will come in months, or even in years, when an angry orphan detonates a belt filled with shrapnel, killing himself and 25 Israelis. At which point the Israelis will launch air strikes killing another 70 Palestinians, radicalizing thousands more, leading to more bombings, and so the cycle continues.

Here’s the part that anti-Israel liberal blockheads like Klein never, ever mention, and don’t seem bothered by in the least — and that they seem to think Israel, by its unconscionable existence, is under some bizarre obligation to put up with:

Larissa Yaakobov stands before me sobbing. Her young daughter and nine-year-old son look on helpless. “I can’t do it anymore,” she says in broken Hebrew, “I can’t live here.” “Here” is Sderot, an Israeli border community adjacent to the Gaza Strip where Larissa has lived since she emigrated from Russia fifteen years ago. Larissa ’s son does not say a word. He hasn’t said much, she tells me, since the two watched a Qassam rocket slam into a woman a few feet away killing her instantly.

Less than twenty four hours before Israel unleashed its air-force on the Gaza Strip, I sat with four families in Sderot who have been injured and traumatized by Hamas rocket fire. In the hours before Israel ’s incursion, the mood was tense—even by Sderot standards. The streets were barren; everyone is bracing for new waves of rockets.

Sderot has no shortage of children’s playgrounds—twisty blue and yellow slides, swings and handle-bars. But children are no where to be seen. I do see plenty of bomb shelters. Every bus-stop in Sderot has been turned into a lime-colored enforced shelter with a single shrapnel-proof window. I enter one of these rooms to see what it is like inside. A car screeches to a halt and the driver dashes out to join me in the shelter. He is panicked and out of breath. Seeing me enter the shelter, he mistakenly thought a rocket was headed our way. I apologize sheepishly for the confusion as he returns to his car and speeds away.

I scan the looming gray clouds above for any indication of incoming rockets or mortars. A single fish-shaped white balloon sitting high off in the distance is my sole source of comfort. It is the Israeli army’s preferred method of identifying incoming rockets. It triggers an alarm which gives residents a few seconds to find shelter. I cannot shake the feeling that at any moment a rocket will fall from the sky and strike me directly. I note the location of every bomb shelter along the way in case I must make a mad dash to safety.

This feeling of unremitting and ubiquitous terror is the norm in a community of 20,000 residents.

And here’s a response from David Bernstein to yet another risible call for a “proportionate” response from a particularly loathsome, dishonest, and shameless liberal:

Israel has engaged in pinpoint targeting of military facilities operated by said terrorist entities, and has gone so far as to send messages in Arabic to residents of Gaza, warning them that if they allow their homes or businesses are sheltering Hamas weaponry, they will be destroyed. Even according to Palestinian sources, the overwhelming majority of victims of Israeli bombs thus far have been Hamas fighters. This is perhaps the least extreme response that any sovereign nation faced with an analogous situation has ever engaged in. Cf. Russia in Chechnya.

Greenwald’s real problem, I surmise, is that he thinks that Israel’s response is “disproportionate” not because its disproportionate relative to Hamas’s military actions and Israel’s military objectives compared to the civilian damaged inflicted (more or less the international law definition of proportionality), but because he believes that Israel is primarily to blame for the situation in Gaza, and therefore any suffering inflicted on Gaza’s civilians is primarily Israel’s fault. Hence his observation about Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which is not at all relevant to whether Israel’s response to the rocket fire is “proportionate,” but rather to whether Israel is morally at fault in general.

But by putting the issue in terms of the “proportionality” of Israel’s response, Greenwald (and others) are obscuring their real argument, which is that Israel is not entitled to act in self-defense because no matter how many rockets are launched into Israeli territory, Israel is ultimately the aggressor in the Gaza situation.

I find that argument hopelessly naive, and, in fact, counterfactual.

As it most surely is — if you assume the best, that is, of someone who in no way merits such generosity. Gleen’s feeble and perfectly typical “response?”

Terrorism ends when the causes of it are addressed, typically via diplomatic means. That’s what history proves.

Uh-huh. I can’t think of a single time myself when that’s actually been the case, but hey, it reinforces said liberal’s mindless faith in diplomacy for its own sake, so it must be true.

In any event, the “root cause” here is Israel’s very existence, so I don’t know how exactly Israel is supposed to diplomatically address Hamas’s intransigence on that point to Gleen’s satisfaction. Actually, I do; I just don’t expect Israel to go along with it, seeing as how there’s no reason on earth why they should, leading as it must to their own demise.

In sum, then, the proper response to Hamas’s unrelenting terrorism, according to smug, Israel-despising boneheads everywhere, is either for Israel to cease to exist, or at worst to haplessly and incompetently lob missiles daily into Gaza, only occasionally hitting anything or killing anybody. That, along with ceaseless negotiations with genocidal thugs who seek one thing, and one thing only — the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews — is the real “solution.” Append the “final” to that at your whim. Captain Ed recaps history for the obtusely naive:

That construct suffers from one problem — the lack of recognition of Israeli actions in the past. Israel has tried military action, occupation, withdrawal, a peace plan (Oslo), another peace plan (Wye River), yet another peace plan (Annapolis), blockade, ending the blockade, and a series of so-called “truces” that allowed the Palestinians to play a triangle offense and provoke Israel into action. What do all of these actions have in common? None of them worked.

Which, of course, is the problem with all liberal “solutions,” especially those involving security, warfare, and defense. Which, of course, has never, ever stopped them from demanding more of the same when the first ten rounds of it fail. They’re “realists,” see. Also “pragmatic.”

If anybody can think of any reason the slightest heed should be paid to these mental giants — people who oppose the very notion of Israel defending itself; who place the most blind, unreasoning faith in useless negotiations with people who aren’t listening; who simply are incapable of understanding the most fundamental principles of warfare; and who see no need to take seriously the constant threats made against Israel and the West by fanatic killers — well, hey, I’m all ears.

Umm, not.