You Don't Mess with the Zohan
(or ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead)

Rashid Khalidi writes about what people don't know about Gaza.

Juan Cole writes:

The new repertoires of struggle against Israel had four dimensions.

# First, they depended on fundamentalist religious party organization (Hizbullah, Hamas), wherein cadres gained popularity in their own base by providing aid and services (e.g. hospitals, soup kitchens, etc.) This development marked a distinctive move away from the leftist romantic guerrilla model of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which was secular and less organic. Because they are religious and political communities, they can lace their guerrilla organizations and materiel through the civilian sphere. Guerrilla operations might be planned out in a civilian apartment building. Rockets might be stored in a mosque.

What he doesn't say is that leftist groups were systematically targeted and destroyed by regimes in the region (see Saddam Hussein) while their religious rivals were allowed to persist.

Hitchens notes

(Should you ever be in need of a free laugh, look up those Western "intellectuals" who believe that a vote for an Islamist party and an Islamic state is a way to vote against corruption! They have not lately studied Iran and Saudi Arabia.)

In his Op-Ed, Khalidi quotes the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."

It is no wonder that after decades of violence and humiliation that many Palestinians have turned to fundamentalist religion. Likewise after centuries of persecution and pogroms, capped by the Nazi genocide, it's not surprising there are Jewish people who are gonzo nationalistic and nutters religiouswise.

But I still don't understand why the Israelis feel as if they need to go it alone after all of the evidence that the US has their back. And after the reality that the Saudis and Egyptians and other Arab nations (or rather their moderate political elite) have more to fear from a rising Iran than from Israel?