• You’ll die laughing from this tweet. 
• The Irish Times justifies Palestinian rocket attacks. I don’t see any other way of understanding this line:
Yet, faced with the certainty that they will never overcome Israel militarily, Palestinians have no other currency with which to wage their legitimate campaign for statehood.
• Over at the Christian Science Monitor, human rights activists split hairs over the legalities of Operation Protective Edge. • Worth reading: Demonizing Israel: A Q&A With Joshua Muravchik • I wonder what Jimmy Savile’s victims have to say about A) comedian Alexei Sayle’s tasteless take on the Gaza crisis and B) The Independent‘s contribution to political discourse by celebrity ruminations as newsworthy.
“Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states,” Sayle said on Tuesday during an interview with Stop the War Coalition, a UK-based anti-conflict protest group. “It clearly doesn’t care about damaging the lives of children,” he added, referring to the late entertainer.
• This Washington Post staff-ed gets it:
Why would Hamas insist on continuing the fight when it is faring so poorly? The only plausible answer is stomach-turning: The Islamic movement calculates that it can win the concessions it has yet to obtain from Israel and Egypt not by striking Israel but by perpetuating the killing of its own people in Israeli counterattacks. More than 200 people, including a number of children, have already died in Gaza; Hamas probably calculates that more deaths will prompt Western governments to pressure Israel to grant Hamas’s demands.
• Daryl Cagle gets it. 
• An Antwerp demonstration featured calls to “slaughter the Jews.”
• Israeli officials continued their media blitz. Shimon Peres defended the airstrikes in an Associated Press interview, Ambassador Daniel Taub got op-ed space in The Independent to weigh in on Hamas’ human shields, while Ambassador Ron Dermer discussed the conflict with the Huffington Post and a conference call attended by Haaretz.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Nimrod Nir (The righteous among the Gazans), Alan Johnson (Time to bust the myth that Israel’s blockade caused Hamas rockets), Ben-Dror Yemini (Human rights activists at Hamas’ service), Elliott Abrams (Why Israel’s winning the war), Jonathan Kay (3 reasons Israel’s winning the war), Clifford May (Separating cause and effect), John Podhoretz (What’s behind the violence?) Nicholas Rosenkranz (On micro-deterrence), Eli Lake (Hamas has already won), and Burak Bekdil (Golda Meir was right).
See also Allison Kaplan Sommer (The only way Israel can win the PR battle: by dying more), Ron Ben-Yishai (Gazans more scared of Hamas than IDF), Dan Margalit (Strike,then find solution), Shlomo Shamir (Hamas’ worst enemy is international indifference), Douglas Murray (The West has drifted away from Israel), Thomas Friedman (Order and disorder), and Roger Boyes (To beat Hamas, make Gaza prosper). CNN discussed the crisis with Dore Gold, Efraim Halevy and Aaron David Miller.
• For a sense of what the critics are saying, see op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and The Independent.
Image: CC BY-NC-SA HonestReporting, flickr/idfonline, flickr/gerlos
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