Negotiate.

Editor,

Many commentators write that Israels' aerial assaults on Gaza are justified because Hamas fires rockets into Israel and that Hamas does this because it it refuses to acknowledge Israel's "right to exist."

Further, these writers assume that bombing Gaza is the only means available to Israel to stop this rocket fire.

I obviously disagree, and I do so -- on all three points: justifiable, Hamas's reason, and only means -- on the basis of, let's call it, Appledorf's First Rule of Warfare:

First of all, the linkage between the rockets and the "right to exist" is not necessarily as tight as those who use it to justify massive military retaliation assume. The rockets are a statement by a vastly weaker actor to a vastly stronger actor that there is conflict to resolve.

Reducing this conflict to the weaker actor's refusal to recognize the stronger's "right to exist" removes all hope of resolving the conflict.

Rule One according to me is that harassing fire by a weaker actor is a call to the stronger to negotiate. And Rule One further requires that the stronger does negotiate because otherwise the cost to both parties is unacceptable.

This is true in the Walmart strike ongoing now, OWS last year, and any conflict in which a weaker actor confronts a stronger one.

It is the responsibility of the stronger actor to negotiate, not retaliate.

I find it particularly telling that Israel refuses to recognize Hamas's right to exist.

Re: "A New Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire" (11/22/2012)