I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington, but that didn’t make the moment any less memorable. I traded a sea of admirers surrounded by neoclassical monuments for a cozy corner of Collegetown Bagels, where my eyes could wander from the television screen to the swirling snow beyond the café’s broad windows.

What I liked most about the inauguration was that it distracted me, if only for a moment, from thoughts of the thousand-plus Gazans killed since late December.

One of the most inspiring moments of the speech came when Obama spoke to the Muslim world, claiming that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Nuance was finally back in Washington, and she looked sexy.

He addressed those nations who seek to harm the U.S., reminding them “that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” It was an incredible one liner. In those 15 words I thought of the constitution, our enlightenment philosophers and the social contract they described, and the great engineering feats of mankind. And then my mind wandered back to Gaza, and I wondered if Obama was only talking about that aforementioned Muslim world, or if he was also speaking to Israel. Would Israel be judged for her destruction?

Numerous headlines have been punctuated by the death tolls in Gaza. Well over a thousand Gazans have been killed by planes, tanks and ground forces. And U.N. facilities and aid envoys have been picked off by Israeli fire, leading to accusations of war crimes.

In Gaza City the list of destroyed targets include the Ministry of Justice, Parliament, the central police station, Islamic University and a fire station. A fire station? Really? I mean, I know these Gazans are an evil bunch – all 1.5 million of them – but a fire station? I’d like to call bullshit on this one.

Israel would have the world believe that every school, U.N. building and government office is a launching site for missiles. They’d have you believe that even a young fireman rescuing infants from flaming buildings occasionally throws on a jumpsuit and machine gun and goes on a killing rampage in downtown Tel-Aviv. But Hamas is not just a military, it’s also a government. It provides services to the people of Gaza. Hamas has both military and political operations.

I’m not going to pretend that the lines between these are never blurred. Nor will I claim their severance runs nearly as deep as Sinn Féin’s separation from the Irish Republican Army. But complicated relationships involve complicated solutions. And it makes you wonder if the U.S. would take this knowledge into account and then proceed to blindly bomb every government building in the tiny territory.

At the Islamic University, Israel’s main target was a science building where officials believed Al-Qassam rockets could be made. Never mind that students and professors who worked in the lab deny such claims. I know I trust the hunch of a few military men over the explicit statements of Arabs with doctorates.

Over the years Israel destroyed Yasser Arafat International Airport and the sole seaport in Gaza City, on Gaza’s heavily patrolled Mediterranean coast. Some claim Gaza is now an open air prison, being completely severed from the rest of the world and a mere 25 miles by seven miles in size (for comparison, that’s roughly seven Manhattans).

Perhaps the most repulsive destruction isn’t simply brick-and-mortar. Educational opportunities have been destroyed. Many qualified Gazans have been denied the ability to study abroad by Israel.

Imagine for a moment that you’re an ambitious young student in University (a stretch, I know). You’ve just won one of the most prestigious fellowships on the planet, an opportunity to conduct original research, funded by an organization whose alumni include a who’s-who of Nobel Laureates and world leaders. Then imagine that opportunity being squandered by an occupying military. Sound a bit frustrating?

In 2008 eight Gazans were awarded Fulbright scholarships. The Israeli military refused to grant them permission to leave the strip, citing that Gazans were only allowed exit for humanitarian reasons. One official told The New York Times that higher education is not a humanitarian concern. Condoleezza Rice begged to differ. After some geopolitical volleyball the world’s most powerful nation’s Secretary of State and dozens of human rights groups and officials throughout Israel and the U.S. managed to get more than half the students out into the fresh air. Good work team!

Perhaps the worst destruction of all is the death of a Palestinian identity. National publications here and elsewhere now refer to citizens of the West Bank and “Gazans,” not Palestinians. Gazan is a word that, as I type, Microsoft Word 2007 does not recognize. It’s amazing how language can be strategically altered overnight.

But Israel has also been building. She has built walls – soaring cement slabs covering every inch of border between two fractured pieces of a broken state. Israel has built bombs, tanks and guns. She has built missiles fired into Gaza from two borders and the Mediterranean Sea. And she has built infrastructure to control and curtail the flow of water into Jordon and the West Bank.

My advice to Israel is to keep building. Higher walls and bigger bombs can eradicate the pests forever. But a slightly cheaper option is to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank.

Give the Gazans proper sewage, running water and irrigated farming. A new fire station might be in order as well. Give them back their national identity, and then maybe those who foster hatred will be alienated from the masses, and the Al-Qassam rockets will stop. In the words of Jonathan Larson as the curtain falls in Act I of Rent, a show about young men and women surrounded by destruction, “the opposite of war isn’t peace — it’s creation.”