While imperfect, this analogy approximates today’s conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s current military retaliation would have been unnecessary had Gaza’s leaders capitalized on the excellent hand they were dealt.

In the ultimate goodwill gesture, Israelis withdrew from Gaza in August 2005. Israeli soldiers literally dragged devout Jews kicking and screaming from land they believed the Torah granted them. Authorities evacuated 21 Jewish settlements, dismantled 38 synagogues, and even excavated 47 deceased Jews from Gaza’s Gush Katif cemetery. Unwanted dead or alive, the Israelis vanished from Gaza without a trace. The 8,150 Jews who lived there linger only in the memories of their Palestinian ex-neighbors.

Gaza’s leaders had the opportunity of a millennium. “Free at last, free at last,” a Palestinian Dr. King could have said. “Now, watch us flourish.” A Gazan MLK could have asked JPMorgan Chase to help construct the Middle East’s most modern financial system. He could have called Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic to help build world-class hospitals. Teams from Georgetown, NYU, and Stanford could have helped establish universities whose graduates could outthink anyone from Cairo to Kabul. Estonian experts could have jetted in to explain how free trade and a flat tax can enrich small nations with powerful next-door neighbors. Club Med could have helped Gaza’s Mediterranean beaches lure free-spending tourists. The world would have come running to help elevate this benighted, Denver-sized territory into an oasis from which the mirage of Middle East peace could blossom into reality — if Gazans had only asked.

But no.

Top Gazans had a different development strategy: pound Israel with rockets.

Between Israel’s disengagement from Gaza through last November 30, Palestinian forces fired 3,123 rockets into southern Israel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs calculates. Since Hamas seized control in June 2007, Gazans have shot 1,685 rockets into Israel — 1,212 of them between January 1 and November 30, 2008. Hamas fired 177 missiles at Israel, even during a June 19-December 19, 2008 “state of calm.” Indeed, as President-Elect Barack Obama discovered on his visit to Israel this past July, rockets are Gaza’s chief export.

Gazans also fired 2,299 mortar shells into Israel since 2005. Israelis traded land for peace. Instead, they got land for pieces of shrapnel. Since Israel withdrew, Gaza’s rockets and mortars have pummeled southern Israel, killing 17, wounding 851, and terrorizing 700,000 others.

Israel is now defending itself appropriately, despite the predictable hair-pulling of anti-Israeli journalists and activists. Some complain that Israel’s response is not proportional. If proportionality is key, may Israel shoot 5,422 missiles and mortars indiscriminately into Gaza’s residential neighborhoods?

Israel’s critics scream when Palestinians tragically suffer collateral damage from its attacks on Hamas’s armaments. But they hush up when Hamas uses Gazans as human shields. Hamas’s TV broadcasts ask civilian men, women, and children to protect suspected terror sites from expected Israeli strikes. Hamas wins either way: If Israel retreats, to spare unarmed civilians, Hamas ridicules Israeli weakness. And if Israel attacks, Hamas hollers about Israel’s anti-Palestinian carnage.

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land,” Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad said on Al-Aqsa TV last February 29. “This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.’”

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s adviser, Ahmed Yousef, told Der Spiegel last February: “If the Israelis want our blood, I’m willing to sacrifice my children.”

Rockets aside, Palestinian self-rule in Gaza has been a Rose Parade of horrors. As Israel withdrew in 2005, it bequeathed state-of-the-art hydroponic farms in which it cultivated some 30 percent of its vegetables in water-filled containers. Palestinians soon destroyed these high-tech facilities in an attack on Jew-farming techniques. Two years later, the Islamo-fascist Hamas seized power from the merely radical Fatah. Inter-Palestinian barbarity exploded. “Women and children have been gunned down trying to get to hospital,” Greg Sheridan reported in June 16, 2007’s Weekend Australian. “Opponents have been bound and gagged and thrown from the tops of buildings.”

In recent days, Hamas fighters have opened fire on Cairo’s forces at the barricaded Gaza-Egypt border. They allegedly killed Egyptian officer Yasser Essawy. Mohamed Barakat, Al-Akhbar’s editor in chief, denounced Hamas’ “blindness and irrationality.” (This shooting may have occurred above the maze of tunnels through which Hamas smuggled weapons from Egypt into Gaza.) On Christmas Eve, Hamas’s parliament in Gaza backed legislation to punish certain activities under sharia law. If it receives final approval, “any Palestinian caught drinking or selling wine would suffer 40 lashes at the whipping post,” the Jerusalem Post reported. For other violations, “punishments include whipping, severing hands, crucifixion, and hanging.”

So, two millennia after Christ, crucifixion returns to the Holy Land.

Israel’s strategic objective should be nothing less than the eradication of Hamas, not one more cease-fire that will give these Islamo-fascist terrorists time to re-arm and re-launch their rockets and homicide bombers. Those who say this cannot be done should remember the words Surge, Fallujah, and Baghdad. As one New Yorker told me on Sunday, “If you step on a nail sticking out of a floorboard, you don’t make peace with the nail. You grab a hammer and pound it flat into the floor.”

Israel’s self-defense against these savages will be tough on rank-and-file Palestinians. Some of them will get stuck in the cross fire as Israel disarms Hamas. This is sad, but inevitable. As Gazans curse Israel’s jets, tanks, and soldiers, they should remind themselves that they had a perfect chance to make the world proud, and they blew it. National Review