A Challenge

In today's Wall Street Journal I have an article demonstrating that Hezbollah and Hamas actually want Israel to kill Lebanese and Palestinian civilians (see 'Arithmetic of Pain') . I challenge the readers of this post to come up with a better alternative for Israel than to try to destroy Hezbollah's rockets, even at the cost of some civilian casualties. My argument is that by hiding behind their own civilians, the Islamic radicals issue a challenge to democracies: either violate your own morality by coming after us and inevitably killing some innocent civilians, or maintain your morality and leave us with a free hand to target your innocent civilians. This challenge presents democracies such as Israel with a lose-lose option and the terrorists with a win-win option. I challenge the readers of this post to recommend to Israel better ways of responding to this challenge. What would you do? What would America do? What should a democracy do?