We allowed this to happen because we accepted that the world would hate Israel and give Hamas a pass.

So when Hamas demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that they're not who you want to try to build a two-state solution with--by slaughtering hundreds of Israeli citizens and promising to do so again and again until Israel ceased to exist--Israel looked around to see who it could rely on to help it from suffering an unending carnage against its people and found...no one.

Nobody was there saying, No, no! This can never happen again! We'll leap to action and eliminate this horrid threat together with you!

A lot of countries expressed sympathy. Nobody expressed an urgent desire to solve the problem together with Israel.

When you're on your own, and you're in pain, and under attack, you take shortcuts. You make mistakes. You don't give people the benefit of the doubt. You act in haste.

Israel needed us to be there, far more, to provide moral clarity, to provide a tempered response, and to provide logistical support for bringing Hamas to justice in a humane way.

We weren't there.

And this is what you get: Hamas and Israel jointly inflicting immense suffering and death on the Palestinian people. (Not genocide--not yet--but horrors do not have to rise to the level of genocide in order to be horrific.)

So, pointedly, it's you. It's you with your smug moralizing and callous dehumanization of Israelis. You're as much at fault as anyone is, because this is where the leverage could have been, and wasn't because of attitudes like yours.

Palestinian lives matter! you tell us.

But Israeli lives matter too. And you're silent on that. So easy, so needed to point this out, and you're silent.

Yes, it's Hamas. Yes, it's Netanyahu. And yes, it's you.