Fighting the Good Fight.

Law professor and Washington Post/Volokh Conspiracy blogger David Bernstein spins the news from Gaza:

{I}t would seem that with hundreds of bombing raids to date and a death toll of less than fifty including terrorists killed trying to infiltrate Israel, a large percentage of those killed are in fact Hamas fighters, whose overt ideological aim is to destroy Israel and murder or exile its Jewish population. So in effect Beinart is asking rabbis to memorialize genocidal terrorists, who by any sensible reckoning are enemies of the Jewish people. Oy. I don’t celebrate their deaths in combat, but I think it’s morally obtuse to suggest that American Jews should feel bad that Israel has killed them in combat.

Bernstein, himself a Jew, was calling out "Jewish writer" Peter Beinart for stating:

I don’t know how many Palestinians have died in Gaza, but it’s in the dozens, including quite a few children. So why can’t our rabbis–who often tell us that Judaism values life above all else–mention their names? I’m not suggesting that our rabbis denounce Israel’s behavior. That’s a separate question. In fact, it’s precisely because many American rabbis will defend Israel’s actions that they should read out the names and ages of the Palestinians who have died. If you’re going to defend war, then at least be honest about what you’re defending. Don’t perpetuate the mass desensitization to Palestinian suffering and death that characterizes mainstream American Jewish life. Tell your congregants that the world in general–and the Middle East in particular–is a tragic place, filled with awful choices. But don’t keep the people you lead morally numb.

The death toll has climbed since Bernstein objected so strongly to Beinart's innocuous call to simply name names. Identify the children killed in this latest round, whose deaths were necessary to protect Israel's survival.

The funny thing is, American taxpayers were told we were financing the Iron Dome to protect Israeli civilians from rockets. So far, it seems to be working.

So why do the soldiers need to continue killing children to protect Israel? Were all these terrorists being targeted, and their chidren too, caught in the acts of preparing violence against Israel when they were killed?

Beinart has the better of the argument, and I suspect Bernstein knows it...