Will the Violence in Gaza Ever End?

Yesterday, the WaPo ran a long story about the escalation of violence in the Near East, citing not only the continued military assault by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza, but the assassinations of one of the Hamas leaders, Ismail Haniyeh, in Teheran and the killing of a Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukr, along with six others in a Beirut suburb, the latter attack answered by a rocket assault on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank which 12 children pruning around on a soccer field when the missile hit.

Before I get into what this spiral of violence means both for the Near East as well as the rest of the world, it should be noted that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are countries or national states in the way that we define such political entities today.

Perhaps the best way to describe these organizations are to call them ‘movements,’ both of which operate like government entities and are sometimes regarded as such by some of the other national states in the Near East, the national state of Israel being a clear exception to that list.

And the reason that Israel, or Eretz Israel, or the Zionist State, or whatever else you might want to call it doesn’t share the basic outlook towards Hamas and Hezbollah which is shared by various Arab states, is because Hamas and Hezbollah are considered to be engaged primarily in terrorist…