"make war not peace"

i don't really claim to be unbiased about the israel-palestine conflict--my bias comes from what is admittedly a too limited understanding of the complex history of the area, from my sister's accounts of living in Ramallah, from the fact that Palestine is clearly the underdog, that U.S. military and financial aid supports Israel and Israel's foreign/domestic policy against Hamas ( more importantly, against the Palestinian people), from the belief that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and consequent military dehumanization of a whole group of people is point-blank unjust, from a severe uncomfortableness with the israeli concept of a birthright (entitlement much?)...
and from stories like this one.
"Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.

They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a "High Quality Body Warmer", dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full - the troops' portable toilets.

But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".

There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. "Gaza here we are," it said in English next to one."

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The New York Times just published an audio video slide show of the 3-week war in Gaza. Photographs and commentary by the photographer(s) are separated into two sets of slides: Israel and Gaza. I'm curious to hear other's reactions, but my reaction was just that I was re-learning (albeit in a very disconnected way) what so many news stories can't help but portray, no matter how off-hand they mention the death counts--less than 15 israelis lost to over 1300 palestinians lost: incomparable pain, destruction, and death in Gaza.

I maintain that being anti-Israel does not make me pro-Hamas, and that we must mourn the lives lost on both sides of this violence.