So what can you do?

I have this friend, with some stake in the matter to be sure (as he is Jewish), who keeps calling on Facebook for "the international community" to intervene militarily in Gaza, depose the Hamas government, and replace them with something better for the people in Gaza.
There are two issues with this. The first is the doubtful legality and usefulness of a military intervention.
Apart from the very doubtful prospect of anything useful coming from a military intervention, the thing that riles me is this desire that someone else should do something. In particular the undefined international community. The only one who has a mandate to approve a military intervention is the UN or the legal government of a country, and it is hard to see this happen when the parties can not even agree on whether there is a country or not. And the UN has had a mandate in the Palestine/Israel since before I was born, to little effect on the current situation. With the Islamic State, things are slightly different, although not much. 
The biggest problem, however, is saying that someone else should do something. Calling for anything to be done on Facebook is even less effective, as this only reaches people you already know, and they are even less likely to take action. Talk is cheap and does not commit to anything.
So what can you do about the situation in Gaza or Syria? It depends on who you are. If you have connections in the OECD, get sponsoring from Google, and fraternize with the high and mighty in Davos, you could do something really useful to create dialogue between the sides. A joint Israeli-Palestine Innovation Conference, for instance, gives the people on both sides the opportunity to get together and talk. You are less likely to shoot rockets at someone you have met than a figure in jacket and shoddy top hat with a hooked nose. More importantly, that would also give them an opportunity to make money and get jobs. If there is anything we can learn from terrorists growing up in our societies, from Adolf Hitler onwards, it is that idle time is the biggest enemy of civil society. When people have jobs and obligations, and a feeling of a place in society, they will not go to Syria or Iraq and fight. The less people have to live on handouts and can focus on creating value in their daily work, the happier they would be and the less likely to become extremists of any hue. Makes you wish more people had bought the paintings of Adolf Hitler.
But I have no contacts in the OECD, in the EU or the Israeli government. I could not arrange a conference at home, let alone in Gaza. So what can I do? Or should I spend my time pointing out that someone should do something on Facebook? Donating my time to Mark Zuckerberg?
As a father of three, my budget is more squeezed than that of most other people. Japan is not particularly generous when it comes to supporting families with children - we actually had to pay to take parental leave, since taxes are assessed according to the previous years salary, but the money you get from the local government to support you is capped at a ridiculously low amount, hardly enough to support a single child, much less three. And time is at a premium - if it was not the only practical way of showing how beautiful my children are to friends and family, I would close my Facebook account. It steals time from my being with the children. I could not go to Gaza and participate in the rebuilding even if I had the money, not just because I prioritize spending my free time with the kids, but also because it certainly is not risk free. An environment full of illicit weapons and unexploded ordinance is not the place for someone whose one-year-olds need him alive, even if it would be fun to open a sushi restaurant in Gaza.
So I do not have very much time to donate, nor a lot of money. Already writing this short blog post on the commuter train has taken me several days and it takes me one hour and 20 minutes to the office. Including changing trains, to be sure.
So I either have to find new time or new money if I want to contribute to something, regardless of how little I can put in. Finding new time is much more difficult than finding new money. By taking a few minutes away from my babies, usually when they are asleep and do not need daddys attention, is still possible. So I joined something calked the World Mail Panel, that checks the quality of the postal delivery systems around the world. Apart from making society an obvious service by checking that the letter carriers do not lose too many envelopes, I get cool stamps from around the world to start off my childrens stamp collections, when they are old enough.
And I get paid a little money which I give to Medicins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders in English, one of the most important organizations in the world today. They are active everywhere there is a conflict and also working to contain the Ebola epidemic and treat those who are infected. For me, who do not have more ties to Gaza than I do to Darfur or Congo, that is a big plus. I do not have to priorotize my meagre contribution. If I did have a bias towards Israel or Palestine - or both - I might act differently, and do something that made both parties talk, like the innovation conference I mentioned. But I do not.