The article seems stuck with the notion that there can be "victory" for only one side. War is not always a zero-sum game, and it is often possible for both parties to achieve significant goals (or prevent the other from achieving significant goals) and thus claim "victory". Indeed, one often finds behind protracted conflicts a system where both fighters at least think they are gaining by fighting. Both sides may be right -- Hamas may be more popular in Gaza and Israel may have greatly reduced the rocket threat in the short term. More importantly, like sports rivals who must meet every so often to stoke their fans, the rulers on both sides have whipped up their home base.

There is no winner yet, armies win battles not wars. It is the politicians who meet afterwards who win the war. They do not even have to fight to win if you realise that the Iranians are most likely to be the winners of the Iraq war.

You point about Iraq is a good one. The Iranians must also take considerable satisfaction from the fact that Israel was not successful in their goal of removing Hamas, an Iranian client, from power in Gaza.

There is no peace until an army wins a war. All the politicians do is make the formal arrangements. Your post makes no sense.

In a case like WWI, you could well argue that nobody won, so the peace which was imposed by the politicians had little chance of succeeding, a thesis proven in spades 20 years later.

This struggle is no different. Unless one is to completely ignore the Palestinian death toll and the near total destruction of the infrastructure, it is obvious that Israel is a clear winner, but Hamas, in its insanity, may be unwilling to accept that. In that case, there will be more killing, more terror, and more death, and most of it will fall upon the heads of the Palestinians, because, in actual fact, Israel won this war 60 years ago and all the attacks upon it since then have amounted to nothing more than fits of pique.

If the Palestinians insist on continuing this suicidal war, eventually they will all be dead and you'll all scream even louder about genocide. But be perfectly clear, assisted suicide is not genocide.

The Crusaders lasted 300 years, the Turks 400 years, the British 150 years.

You can bet your ass we Palestienians will outlast these little Zionist shit that calls itself "Israel".

PALESTINE FOREVER AND FOREVER PALESTINE!!!!

In case anyone was wondering..."Philistine" means "Palestinian"

It also means stupid boor.

AND YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF, TOO.

The Crusaders lasted 300 years, the Turks 400 years, the British 150 years.

You can bet your ass we Palestienians will outlast these little Zionist shit that calls itself "Israel".

PALESTINE FOREVER AND FOREVER PALESTINE!!!!

'in case anyoneis wondering, phillistine means palestine.'

Actually, it was after the failure of the third jewish revolt that Rome decided to force the jews out of their homeland. Rome renamed Israel, Palestine as an insult to the jews, and forbade any jew from re-entering the jewish holy city, Jerusalem. Of course, the jews returned after the weakening of Rome.

Sir, you're wrong again. It was Herodotus, considered the father of historians, who named the area Palestine AT AROUND 400 BC.

WAY THE FUCK BEFORE ANY ROMANS DID.

SIR, LEARN YOUR HISTORY BEFORE YOU OPEN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, SIR!

Ted who divided the boundaries of Europe after WWII, the generals or the politicians? Before the war Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Poland, Hitler invaded Poland Britain and France declared war and although British soldiers were on the winning side Stalin ended up with all of Poland. Who won?

Ted's an idiot. He thinks you can win a war. He thinks it's like some kind of fucking game, like capture the flag. The people Israel exiled sixty years ago were neither winners nor losers in the war, proper. They were displaced persons, victims of Israel's terrorist depopulation ("ethnic cleansing) program. If Israel hadn't kicked them out, it would now have an arab majority (some of these arabs would be jews, some christians, most of them muslims).

Indiscriminate crimes against whole populations as acts of war are crimes -- war crimes. That's the actual, most accurate definition of terrorism. Sending untargeted rockets at neighboring cities in order to terrorize the people there is indeed terrorism, but SO WAS THE BLOCKADE. And so were the crimes that put the refugees in Gaza in the first place, sixty and some years ago. To respond to those rockets now with equally untargeted bombing that results in wholesale destruction and the deaths of thousands IS ALSO TERRORISM. When the army of a democratic state commits terrorism their uniforms and political butt coverage don't negate the fact of their terrorism -- if anything, they make it worse. This isn't hard to figure out -- people, have we forgotten My Lai ALREADY? Then shame on us.

I find it astonishing that Israel, a nation ACUTELY sensitive to history, denies its own foundational history in its treatment of its palesitnian victims. These are people who, until Israel took everything from them, had never been part of any kind of war, any kind of combatant state.

And so this happened sixty years ago. So what? The HOLOCAUST happened scarcely more than sixty years ago, do we just write that off as well? Holocaust deniers are scum, but zionists who write off the bad debts of zionism as if the passage of sixty years somehow negates them are scum as well.

Actually, you stupid shit, Herodotus called the land Eastern Syria, and several hundred years later, a Roman translator, recognizing the place, translated it as the Roman province he knew, Palestine. In any case, the name is derived from the Philistines, as you no doubt know, though if you imagine them to be the ancestors of modern Palestinians, you're even stupider than I thought.

LEARN HISTORY, SCHMUCK!

We won. Poland lost. In any case, until the war was won and Germany was defeated, the politicians still had to sit back and wait their turn. Why is this so difficult for you?

Maybe you should just write your own dictionary. Then you'd never have to be wrong. In any case, we can define anything we want as anything we want. Who's to stop us here?