Inside the Hamas attack on one Israeli kibbutz.
Violence against Palestinians surges in the West Bank.
A BBC journalist reporting from inside a Gaza hospital (from a couple of days ago, it's probably worse now).
Peter Beinart is one of the few prominent pro-Israel Jewish writers to actually recognize the Palestinians as human beings with legitimate interests and rights; he here draws an interesting contrast with the ANC's struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
"Hamas is dragging Israel towards the abyss." I fear this is a correct assessment. If the West Bank erupts, if Hezbollah attacks, if Iran joins the fight, either directly or through support of intermediaries, and hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops are in Gaza, this could become an existential crisis not just for the Palestinians but for Israel. At that point, would Israel use nuclear weapons against Iran (or against Hezbollah)? Would the U.S. intervene? And then what?
UPDATE: Interesting comment from longtime reader Dr. Roger Albin, which he kindly gave permission to share:
The Beinart essay is very good but like many discussions of the end of Apartheid in South Africa, overlooks what may be the most critical factor – the role of Cuba and the struggles in the former Portuguese colonies. The Cuban-led expulsion of South African troops from Angola in the late 1980s ended the South African regime’s hope of maintaining a cordon sanitaire of client states around South Africa. The South African leadership was intelligent enough to realize that the long-term survival of the regime was unlikely and that some form of negotiated settlement was the only way out. To put it crudely, the Cuban Armed Forces forced the Apartheid regime to the bargaining table. This is very well described in Piero Gleijeses’ two excellent books on this topic. As Beinart points out, ANC success was partly due to its commitment to a pluralistic democracy and disciplined violence, but these would have been unavailing without Castro’s commitment to defending anti-colonial movements in Africa and the fire power of the Cuban military.
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