While leaders may be slow to act, the people of the world continue to make their wishes known – ceasefire NOW! However, Israel plays a strategic role for Western nations, particularly the US, in the Middle East. Conflict between Arab nations is lucrative for the world’s largest arms dealer (the USA), and maintaining peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is important as it is Iran (and the triumvirate of Iran, China, and Russia) that requires Israel as the nuclear foil of US’ Middle East “peace plan”. It is this crucial role that requires a global balancing act while atrocities are the daily experience of Gazans and Palestinians. So the US supplies arms to Israel (largely for its conflict with Iran) which Israel chooses to use in its “war” with Hamas. However, it is difficult to call it a “war” with the complete lack of parity between the two. Then for Netanyahu to claim this is a war between “civilization and barbarism”.  I don’t even know where to start to untangle that bit of tripe. When one party has completely decimated the infrastructure of the other party, and the controlling party controls everything going into and out of that party of the other, and it continues to bomb the other’s region into rubble so small that the atomized dust is a significant health problem, who is the barbarian?