ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

The Israeli military actions in Gaza have caused, once again, a general discussion within the chattering class about the situation in the Middle East as a whole, and the relationship between the conflict there and the world-wide conflict with radical Islam.

Andrew Bacevich believes the U.S. should abandon the tactics that mimic the Israelis in their efforts against Hamas.

Benny Avni believes the Israelis are simply managing the war as best they can, and by war he means the decades-long existential struggle to maintain the Jewish State.

Politics, of course, is a big part of the Gaza war, as Christopher Hitchens points out in this piece in which he laments the victory of the Islamist radicals at the expense of ordinary Palestinians, and politics is the center of the story in this piece which chronicles the rising political fortunes of Ehud Barak in Israel.

Rashid Khalidi has this view of the realities in Gaza, while Nicholas Kristof says the recent fighting is really the result of a boomerang effect.

For what it's worth, here is Jimmy Carter's view on the fighting.

For what it's worth, here is my view. I agree with Avni when he points out that this latest fighting is part of Israel's ongoing effort to manage the war against those who would destroy them. I agree with the idea that political posturing plays a big role. In the end, for the average Palestinian and the average Jewish Israeli, those politicians who promise to defend them against those who would oppress them or kill them are the ones who get the votes and the support. Thus, as Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli towns, even thought they killed only a relatively small number of people, the bombardment created anxiety and anger among Jewish Israelis who live within range of the rockets, and even those who do not (as they anticipate that the enemy will get better rockets with a longer range). Politically, that leads to the hard-line position (counter-attack) gaining traction against the soft-line position (negotiate). That is what happened in Israel in recent months, and it reached a point that, with elections looming, the leaders of Israel could no longer afford politically to keep the soft-line position as the official policy.

Meanwhile, for the Palestinians, since they are just as human as the Jewish Israelis, the very same dynamic is at work. They are oppressed by Israeli control over their lives (Parenthetically, please remember that I am not writing about TRUTH, but PERCEPTION. The TRUTH, for Jewish Israelis, is that they are an oppressed people who fled an unimaginable holocaust and established a state in their ancestral homeland in order to create an environment that would prevent any effort to exterminate them from ever happening again. The TRUTH, for Palestinian Arabs, is that they are an oppressed people who were forced to flee from their ancestral lands by a colonial invader who unjustly established a state on their land and, through superior technology, firepower, and support from the United States, holds dominion over their lives even when they live outside the boundaries of what they call the "Zionist Entity"). When the Palestinians feel an even greater sense of hopelessness overtake them, they are much more likely to heed the message of Hamas, which is a message of armed resistance against oppression, and an eventual victory over their oppressors. The corruption and, worse, perceived weakness in dealing with the Israelis, of Fatah led to the ascendancy of Hamas, especially in Gaza. This led to the economic blockade of Gaza by Israel, which led to even greater support for Hamas to continue to bombard Israel.

So, in the end, the Israeli public, which sees themselves as the "good guys", an oppressed people being bombarded by a gang who wishes them dead, called for a military response, which they finally got. The Palestinians, who see themselves as the "good guys", an oppressed people being economically strangled by a gang of interlopers who treat them like second-class citizens, at best, respond by supporting those who would take the fight to their oppressors.

If human nature is what I think it is, then I see no end to this process, unless Israel fundamentally changes (that is, it ceases to be a Jewish State) or the Islamic world fundamentally changes enough (rejecting Islamist extremism to the point that the extremists become marginalized) to get the support necessary for the Palestinians to achieve a state that can live side-by-side with Israel. Of the two possibilities, I suspect the former is more likely than the latter.