The false equivalents Rich Lowry tries to promote in his column (“A presidency in its dotage,” May 14) speaks volumes about his humanity, or lack thereof.

Describing conditions in Gaza, in his own words — “war … waged in a high-density urban environment against an adversary that hides among civilians” — reveals the core of the problem.

That is a condition which restricts a real leader from applying a “scorched earth” answer to a military problem.

There are millions of innocent civilians lives at stake.

The current Israeli administration, solidly under the thumb of Benjamin Netanyahu, needs some constraint in its way of “solving” the Hamas dilemma.

President Biden has not turned his back on the administration but cautioned it, by withholding the massive armaments with which it intended to wipe out Hamas.

Given our many decades and many billions in support for Israel, this is appropriate leadership.

Lowry does not seem to understand that all-out war would never solve a problem like Hamas. He is more interested in making political points about civil protest, in support of a candidate who calls service people “losers and suckers”.

Ignoring the massive civilian casualties which would occur, would only create more Hamas-like anti Israelis.

For context, Mr. Lowry should know that I have lived in my childhood through all-out war. The center of the town where I was born was flattened by the Nazis in 1940, including the street where we lived, and only the luck of my parents moving the extending family out of town, just nine months before the war, is what saved us.

Peter van Oosten, Greene