What makes a war?...The weakness of power

Well I hoped to move on past the trouble in Middle East but alas it has come back to the beginning of the conflict, it is as if the past decade plus years of negotiation did not happen as Israel move back into southern Lebanon and re-“secures” the Gaza.
There are many points I could mentions about this, the fact that it could be argued that the Palestinians did not kidnap a an Israeli solder but detained for investigation a suspected terrorist. The fact the Israelis have detained on little or no evidence thousands of Palestinians (and yes a view very deserving and violent ones) required a response, so the Hamas, a group I do not support nor agree with its ultimate goals, used the only leverage it had to try and secure the freedom of its fellow citizens from an aggressive, powerful and paranoid (with some cause) occupier. Israel just blew up, and not the first time, an entire building to “remove” a suspected leader of Palestinian resistance. This they did with the claim it was trying to save lives…Israeli lives…and the fact that nine “collateral” people died (and the target was not one of the fatalities) is seen as acceptable losses…I mean they were not Israeli.
But no, I will focus on the news talk and them claiming that the war between Israel and Palestinians…interesting one side is a country and the other a people…and thought how inappropriate that word was. War, as defined by international law is between two independent states. In this case though we have one participant, a favoured US ally, a huge military budget, a regional uni-superpower country and the other participant (and it must be stated that they Palestinians are actively aggressive) a phantom idea of a nation with no independent army, financial support (which was recently cut off) and totally dependent on the other. This is not a war, in any sense of the term; it might be a civil war, if you believe that Israel was granted by god the historical lands of Israel, or an occupation, if you believe that the 1947 UN resolution created 2 nations, or a mix of both. I think it can only be seen as a war of aggression, an attempt to ensure that the weaker acquiesces completely to the stronger; this is supported by the unilateral “withdrawal” of occupation forces (the lands in questions have never been legal or formally annexed so it is technically still occupied lands) from territory that Israel does not want or thinks too costly to keep and that any nation that is left behind would be impotent and depended on them. This has a distasteful reek of that of what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938.
I do not want to make the claim that the Israelis are Nazis, that would be ridicules; the Nazis had the belief their nation had a historical right to expansion; that its nation has been the subject of aggression by its neighbours; that it have within its midst agents of a power that is intent on the destruction of the nation and willing to do any sabotage (old speak for terrorism...funny how language change); that pre-emptively attached its neighbours to protect its people and to restore lands that historically belonged to them…no, there are no similarities there at all. There is an old saying that “in time we hate that which we often fear.” When a victim of brutality is given power, they are often tempted to show the same or greater vehemence in revenge and fear, irrespective of the threat, real or perceived, to them. You may have noticed I have talked a lot about Israel and nothing about the Jews. I did this on purpose because it is easy to fall into the trap of condemning a people for the actions of a nation. Israel are the aggressors, they just happen to be primarily Jewish, and accident of history, not a precondition for conflict. There is something about fundamentalism to be said, that exists in Israel, and Palestine and the us and in many other places, but that is a blog for another day.