Recommended: Shock the Casbah

Since I have just recommended Adam Garfinkle's ongoing series on our own national troubles, I might as well also recommend his thoughtful article on the current Israel-Palestinian mini-war: Shock the Casbah.

The Israelis really are in an impossible position. If Canada or Mexico were lobbing rockets into adjoining US states, you can bet there would be an immediate and overwhelming military response from us.  Any US administration that did anything less would be turned out of office in days, if not lynched in the streets. Yet there continue to be a vocal minority in the world who somehow sees all this as Israel's fault, with an emotional reaction to every civilian death on the Palestinian side but apparently little or no empathy for the Israeli side of the problem.  Some of this, I suppose, is endemic anti-Semitism, which is still very much alive in the world.

In truth, the successive Israeli governments haven't always made the best tactical choices, just as our own government hasn't always done the smartest thing. But they really do face an impossible situation - an enemy embedded geographically in their midst who has sworn to eradicate them from the face of the earth, and is quite willing to kill civilians and children, and even their own people, to achieve this end.  By now the Palestinians have reached the "Northern Ireland" phase, where they have a large cadre of thugs who have fought so long that they know no other life and want nothing more than to keep fighting forever.  It is pretty hard to negotiate any sort of meaningful truce, let alone a permanent peace, with such people.