In his 1817 poem “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley reflected on a fragment of the colossal statue of Pharaoh Ramses II—the once great ruler of whom “Nothing beside remains.” Two years after composing those verses, Shelley was inspired by a different ancient monument—the Arch of Titus, which portrays Roman soldiers parading the menorah and other items pillaged from the Second Temple—to write two “orations.” Meir Soloveichik comments on them:

The first fragment imagines a 19th-century Jew standing at the Arch of Titus, staring at “the desolation of a city.” The Jew describes himself studying the Roman “procession of the victors, bearing in their profane hands the holy candlesticks and the tables of shewbread, and the sacred instruments of the eternal worship of the Jews.” On the opposite panel, he sees the emperor, “crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous numbers of his triumphant army.” Titus, in other words, demands that all in his empire look upon his works and despair. Yet studying the destroyed colosseum nearby, the Jew is struck by a realization: “The arch is now moldering into ruins. . . . The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory.”

Or to put it differently, when it came to the Roman Empire, “nothing beside remains.”

The same, of course, could not be said for Jewish civilization. The menorah borne aloft to Rome ultimately disappeared when the city was sacked by the Vandals, but it was remembered in lamps relit in Jewish homes throughout the centuries, as it will be this and every year at Hanukkah. And if Jews chose to remember the story of one small flask of oil that somehow endured, it was because they view that tiny miracle as a metaphor for their own national life. Shelley’s Ozymandias is a story not only of Egypt, but of nation after nation throughout history—except one.

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.