If you want to see it as a tragedy, I'm not going to take that away from you. Tragedy is a part of the human condition. We all have our tragedies, individual, group, religious, national even.

It's what you do with that tragedy that's on you. A constructive way to deal with a tragedy might look something like asking yourself:

1. What happened here?
2. What can I learn from this?
3. Where did I add meaning to what happened?
4. How can I structure my life to avoid like tragedy in the future?
5. What meaning can I give to my life to make it worth moving forward?
6. How can I develop myself so that I can have a victory in the face of this tragedy?
7. And maybe as a bonus:
   
   1. What can I bring to the world to help others who may face what I did? or
   2. How can I use the lessons of this tragedy to make the world better?

I've structured this to bias to a certain view of the world, but I think this is our Western view. Life is rough, and sometimes you get the short end of the stick.

Sometimes you get tortured and massacred, or just sufficiently oppressed, for centuries or even just too long, and then some sea change moment occurs. In more recent popular memory are such things as the French and American Revolutions, the numerous Communist revolutions, civil rights movements, civil wars, liberation movements, World Wars, and the collapse of various Communist systems.

We've learned, or those who honestly study history have, which movements are morally corrupt, and which actually honor the individual and give him an opportunity to live into greatness. And it's the few that put the individual at the top that have given us the best of what humanity has to offer. And America has been a pretty good model—one of the best—at this.

And in the American model, we've learned what deserves respect. We respect people like Tony Robbins, Oprah, Dr. Dre, Frederick Douglas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Jones, Ralph Lauren, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Nellie Bly, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, because they just got up and did in the face of whatever was.

They just showed up, again, and again, and again, until they got some traction, and then rocked the world. They took the long view, and gave their lives to a bold new future.

What they did not do is call themselves victims. They did not take up the Marxian call to tear down those who succeeded. They chose instead to build themselves up. And when they were disgusted, they choose to educate and agitate for reform rather than blame and destroy. They understood that when you harken to the call to destroy, you too often end up destroying yourself.

They educated themselves so they could educate others. They organized and built and gathered and made such a compelling case for themselves that they could not be ignored. It is the people who chose to be Nelson Mandela instead of Robert Mugabe, King instead of X, and the inspiration of this article, the Jews instead of the Palestinians.

When the Jewish world is upended, and this includes massacres, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, forced labor and army service, conversion on penalty of death, and attempts at extermination, you see again and again a spirit of rebirth and renewal, new attempts to bring value to the world, new attempts to build bridges. We have our tragedies; we choose to rise from the ashes.

And the Arabs who fashion themselves 'Palestinians,' they have their declared catastrophe, that they were expelled and forced to move. But what have they done with this?

Let's take it to the personal level: If your house burns down, your life will be upended, but at some point in time I expect you to get back to work and build something new. If you bought, or were given, the house next door, and spent the rest of your life looking at where the old house stood, and teaching your kids to do the same, even when a new building, or even a city, had been built there, we'd probably think something was a bit off. And if you add to that a hate complex because someone took the old lot and improved it, we might refer you to a shrink, and if you started taking pot shots at the new owner, we'd lock you up.

But this is what's happened here. Sure, some Palestinians lost their home. Yes, they are welcome to call it a tragedy. Okay, so now what?

They may choose to build a new world, or choose to make a new war.

And they are choosing war; and they are choosing the consequences.

And in this President Trump, through his State Department, is failing. Unlike his spokesman Heather Nauert, I am in no way “saddened by loss of life in #Gaza today.” It's just daft to be “working on a plan for peace” when the other side has declared you the enemy and is making war.

I'll leave off with some thoughts from William Tecumseh Sherman. These are from various sources, and I've picked the order, but you get the point:

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth-right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.

To those who would submit to the rightful law and authority, all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjust.

While seemingly repugnant, his is the only way war has ever been won. And it might have taken a hundred years of further struggle to really see the peace, but it took a man with the backbone of Sherman to make it happen.