Peter Wehner reflects on the importance of tradition and why so few today, including conservatives, are able to appreciate it:

[I]t’s my impression that today conservatives appeal far more to abstract principles than to tradition, a word and concept that is rarely invoked. . . . There’s a tension between tradition and progress, but tradition is necessary for progress, which builds on what we have. . . . To detach ourselves from tradition is to detach ourselves from the human story, from trials and errors, and so from a source of wisdom. . . .

[M]ost of us are certain that our view of things is inherently superior to how people in the past viewed them. We see ourselves as the most enlightened age of all. . . . [There] is something rather off-putting about our self-congratulatory attitude, the belief that we are so much wiser than those who came before us. On some matters we surely are, but on some matters we surely are not. And ask yourself this: in matters of philosophy, theology, science, statecraft, literature, and music, who today is the equal of Aristotle, Augustine, Newton, Lincoln, Tolstoy, and Mozart? Then ask yourself whether you think they have anything to teach us.

In The Vindication of Tradition, [the historian of religion] Jaroslav Pelikan uses the example of children and parents. He points out how, when we’re young, we often believe our parents are all-wise, blind to their foibles. But it is no less childish, once we discover their foibles, to deny them the respect and honor that is due them for having given us life and having sacrificed for us.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.