Ethan Bronner writing in the New York Times January 13 from Jerusalem lays it on the line:

"To Israel's critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer:  Israel's war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of the Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already insulated and impoverished population into the Stone Age and it must be stopped.

"Yet here in Israel, very few at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.

"Since Israeli warplanes opened the assault on Gaza 17 days ago about 900 Palestinians have been reported killed, many of them civilians.  Red Cross workers were denied access to scores of dead and wounded Gazans, and a civilian crowd near a United Nations school was hit, with at least 40 people killed.

Iran, seeing the U.S. invade Iraq, with the falsehood Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was on the road to nuclear power, recognized that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed along with 4,222 U.S. forces.  They feel they must have powerful weapons to defend themselves.

On the other side of Iran the Afghanistan War rages.  The U.S. is fighting to displace the Taliban from power, that the U.S. under Ronald Reagan had U.S. soldiers fighting and dying to place in power.  

Now Bush has had U.S. soldiers fighting and dying this time around to replace the Taliban, an extremist Islamic terrorist group that had been provided with the latest U.S. high-tech weapons.  In effect U.S. service personnel are dying with equipment and training that the U.S. provided.

The question must be asked:  Is the U.S. planning to have endless wars?

Ethan Bronner gives insight, helping to understand the Israeli viewpoint of the Israeli-Hamas conflict:

"'This is a just war and we don't feel guilty when civilians we don't intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields,' said Elliot Jager, editorial editor of the Jerusalem Post, who happened to answer the phone for an interview while in Ashkelon, an Israeli city about 10 miles from Gaza, standing in front of a house that had been hit two hours earlier by a Hamas rocket.

"'We do feel bad about it, but we don't feel guilty,' Mr. Jager added.  `The most ethical moral imperative is for Israel to prevail in this conflict over an immoral Islamist philosophy.  It is a zero conflict that is what is not understood outside this country.'"