Despite a massive inquiry, the authors of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on last summer’s Gaza war confess themselves unable to “determine conclusively the intent of Palestinian armed groups with regard to the construction and use of tunnels.” And yet, as David Horovitz writes, even while scratching their heads over that mystery, the authors did manage to find plenty of reasons to condemn Israel:

The UNHRC inquiry team . . . produced a 284-page report. And yet, in all that verbiage, it neglected to detail precisely how it was that Hamas came to power in Gaza, and what it is that Hamas stands for. It chose not to mention Hamas’s strategic goal of destroying Israel. It mixed up cause and effect in describing the security blockade as “strangling the economy in Gaza and [as having] imposed severe restrictions on the rights of the Palestinians,” as though it is the blockade that has radicalized Gaza, rather than having been introduced as an attempted defensive measure by Israel (and Egypt) against the import of weaponry by Hamas.

The UNHRC commission equated the IDF, committed to self-examination and self-criticism as it struggles to protect Israel against threats on numerous fronts, with an Islamic extremist organization preaching unmitigated hatred for Israel and seeking to kill Israelis. (Israel emphatically must, and does, constantly investigate and re-examine its military policies and operations; it doesn’t need a prejudiced UN panel to call it to order.) Actually, the inquiry did worse than that: it wandered bizarre linguistic alleyways in a bid to somehow differentiate between the Palestinian rulers and the armed groups of Gaza, as though they were not one and the same, and wishfully referred to the “State of Palestine” even as it held Israel responsible for the territory of that non-existent state.

Nowhere, in all those acres of words, did it offer the simple contextual truth in which last summer’s conflict played out, and in which, grimly, future conflicts are all but certain to unfold: Israel has no presence in Gaza. Israel has no territorial quarrel with Gaza. If Hamas halted its violence against Israel, there would be no suffering on either side of that border. But so long as Hamas continues to work for Israel’s destruction, Israel, like any nation that seeks to survive, will have no choice but to defend itself.

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.