The Arab-Israeli War Goes Into Its Second Year.

In his remarkable book, Roots of Revolution, Franco Venturi traces terrorism back to the nineteenth century, when certain dissident groups first tried to use wholesale acts of mass violence to challenge the authority and hence the legitimacy of the Russian Tsar. If you could make people feel they couldn’t depend on the government to protect them and guarantee daily safety, the whole basis of the government’s raison d’être would disappear and the government would collapse without necessitating a widespread civil war.

Unfortunately, what terrorism tended to do both in Russia before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as well as in the recent manifestations of terror violence in the Near East, is strengthen the existing government and make it more difficult for dissident elements within the country to achieve their political ends.

This is certainly the case as the first-year anniversary of the Hamas assault on the Kfar Aza kibbutz and other population sites adjacent to the Gaza Strip has come and gone. My eagle-eyed lawyer sister took the photo yesterday (see above) of the rally in New York’s Union Square calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, but the Netanyahu government has largely retained support for its demolition of the Palestinian enclave both within Israel and without.