JAD,
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Why do you interject the morality issue into firebombing Japan? We were at war and anticipating the Japanese were good for their word that they intended to fight to the last man and woman in defense of the homeland.
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that was my point. IF israel is going to go to war and clean out hamas, that's the very attitude they need to take. the israelis would need the will to kill hamas (and most likely gaza, as well) down to its last man and woman, morality and int'l outcry be damned. they're not willing, nor are they in a position, to do so.
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Firebombing was a tactic we employed but was never expected to be decisive. We had always planned to invade with massive troop landings. Military planners feared losses of US troops in the hundreds of thousands. How impervious were we to moral issues if we were willing to incur losses of that magnitude?
Of course, it was spectre of so many losses that prompted us to use the A-bomb.
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as with my other riff, a bit OT, but...firebombing a la curtis may was considered to be a strategy; US high command was thinking about just putting a blockade on japan and firebombing the hell out of japan until the US could just walk in. it was only after okinawa and the spectre of soviet landings that the US finally ditched that plan and came up with operation olympic.
however, the moral issue here would have been the slaughter of the japanese. for all the israelis have suffered at the hands of palestinian terrorism, they haven't been willing (for both moral, historical, and political reasons) to slaughter the palestinians down to the last man, the way the US was quite willing to do in 1945.
absent this will, the only choice they have is to negotiate, or at least to talk.