Dead People Aren't A Math Problem

     Soldiers, civilians and every version of combatant in between from the most innocent of persons to the worst of terrorists aren't counters in a game.  They're people.

     Any time you try to do math with them, you end up pursuing morally repugnant lines of thought.  "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" at least pursues balance, albeit bloodily; ten, or a hundred or a thousand of the other side for one of your own does not, and cannot.  It's a crime to murder one; it's a crime to murder millions, and pseudoStalinesque cynicism aside, turning it from a tragedy into a statistic doesn't actually change what it is.  One killing doesn't magically make another one or thousands more okay, though it may be necessary in order to stop the process from continuing, a matter which is only clear after the fact.

     The usual pundits and online self-appointed experts are holding forth on the interim ruling of the International Court of Justice in regard to South Africa's (essentially a proxy for Palestine) charges of genocide against Israel's military actions in the Gaza Strip.  To them, it either went too far or didn't go far enough, and never mind that the ICJ is toothless: nations accept or ignore its rulings voluntarily, so the World Court tends to not issue orders that it knows will not be obeyed.

     I'd love to have a real strong opinion on the conflict and share it with you, but I keep getting distracted by the piles of bodies and the plight of the survivors, and by the festering emotions on all sides that the present action will not relieve, no more than any of the previous ones have.  I don't have any answers.  All I know is that human suffering isn't a math problem.  The solutions to it may be, but we're not close to knowing how to set up those equations, let alone how to solve them.