Gaza again: what is a Christian perspective on the slaughter of the innocents on both sides of a concrete wall of hate?

I am sick and tired of this. I did a search for Gaza on my previous blog posts since I started in 2007 and found several posts in which I tried to express outrage, sorrow, hunger for peace, perplexity, compassion. You try to be fair, to see both sides; you know that rockets into Israel will bring missiles and tanks intyo Gaza; you try to understand the mentality of a people whose own natioanl tragedies have been about overwhelming power harnessed to their destruction, about the ghettoisation of the enemy. And against this the recent background of three Israeli teenagers and the burning alive of a Palestinian teenager, allegedly as revenge.

Once again what is happening to the people of Gaza befalls them because of who they are, where they are. There are few effective voices speaking on their behalf to their neighbour who behaves without proportionality, kills civilians with impunity, calls it a tragedy and continues more of the same. Criticism of Israeli military action is muted for fear it will be undetrstood as anti-Jewish; not anti-semitic, the Palestinian people are also Semite people. And that obscene concrete dividing wall of hostility stands as a negation of every Palestinian hope, and as an affirmation of every Israeli citizen's fears. 

When I pray Kyrie Eleison, I havn't a clue what mercy would look like between militant haters. When I pray for peace, I realise it presupposes justice, but whose justice, and what has to happen first? And what do I do with my anger, the inward pull towards demonising the powerful and overlooking the power of a militant enemy to provoke disproportionate retaliation, and the death of the innocent in order to further the cause of, well, justice apparently. |The US now wants to broker a cease-fire – why wait till around 100 Palestinian fatalities are recorded, most of them civilians and many children?

I'm sick and tired of this. No that isn't a loss of hope; but it is an honest description of the weariness and wariness I feel when once again the cycle of violence is given righteous status on both sides, and the cost is borne by the innocent.