That all sounds reasonable until you ask how many civilians had hamas rockets killed, before Israel bombarded them.
And compare that to the number of civilians Israel has killed both before and since.
There is no reciprocity in your argument. Hamas has not attacked Israeli weapon storehouses and destroyed their attack capability. Or destroyed large areas of housing and schools. or attacked and killed children and families in Un safe schools.
So your argument is that Israel should not respond now because it has been fortunate in the success of its passive rocket defenses and in its intelligence thwarting Hamas attacks, and because not enough Jewish civilians have died to warrant response.
Hamas would certainly do those things if it could, and has tried to the best of its capabilities.
And Israel does not house weapons or secret attack tunnels in UN safe schools, or use civilian housing and hospitals as staging areas for artillery and other military actions. Nor does it use its civilian populace as human shields, or hide its fighters amongst the civilians in civilian homes. Whereas, that is precisely what Hamas does.
I cannot help but wonder if some radical French separatists decided to start lobbing rockets over the channel into England, would your country decide that it was not worth responding merely because the southern part of England has excellent bomb shelters that people can run to and hide in every couple of hours, and really, only a couple of people have died...?
Israel has stored up a great deal of hate in Europe over this issue.
Europeans have hated Jews for a long time before Israel came about. This issue is just the current handy excuse. Once a long-lasting cease-fire comes about, another excuse will be found.
Considering that anti-Semitism is on a fifty-year rising high in Europe, there are anti-Semitic riots, vandalism, and propaganda all over Europe, all over the right of the Jewish State to defend itself-- and this is happening not even 75 years after the Holocaust...?
I'm sure you'll forgive us if have trouble taking the moral judgments of Europe very seriously right now.
What Israel has done is regarded by all right thinking people as evil, because that is what it is.
And by "right thinking people," you mean, those who would prefer to see an independent and unfettered Palestinian state run by a radical Islamist terrorist group than to see a Jewish State that is willing to defend itself.
Perhaps "right thinking people" ought to be a little more critical in their consumption of Palestinian propaganda, and think a little bit more about the historical processes that prompted Jews to feel strongly that a Jewish State in our ancestral homeland could not wait, and whose existence must be protected vigorously.
It is nearly on a par with the Islamic State militants actions against minorities.
Israel has the most advanced military in the Middle East. Its forces are a powerhouse war machine. If it were truly as amoral and bloodthirsty as this sort of criticism paints it, Gaza would be a parking lot, and there would not be a Palestinian standing in any territory controlled by Israel. However, Israel not only has a million and a half Arab citizens, who are free to practice their own religions, and who have nearly total authority over most of their holy sites, and who vote and have representation in the Knesset; but Israel wages a careful war of inches and centimeters against the terrorists who attack it rather than simply wiping them out, civilian casualties be damned. Israel phones ahead and texts ahead to warn civilians to leave an area about to be bombed, it broadcasts evacuation warnings on the radio, and even during this conflict, it provides Gaza's civilians with electricity, water, and humanitarian aid, as well as taking Gaza's wounded for treatment in Israeli hospitals.
It is ludicrous and absurd to compare Israel to the Islamic State, which exemplifies extreme intolerance of other religions, which kills indiscriminately and on a much larger scale, and seek only to empower themselves as leadership of a theocratic fascist state. It is patently offensive, and is indeed anti-Semitic.
Jews must take at least some responsibility for what their government has done.
Most Jews are ready to critique the actions of the Israeli government when they disagree with it. The overwhelming majority of them understand that this is a long-provoked war of self-defense, and Israel is doing the best it can to minimize civilian casualties (always an inevitability in war), while also knowing that Hamas is doing its best to maximize them.
