israel

This means, of course, that people are manipulated. Take the current Gaza conflict. The ceasefire came neatly before Obama’s inauguration, conveniently getting the new president off the hook for a spell, until a resumption of hostilities could be finessed on terms to fit the new administration. Now we’re on the brink of those new hostilities. How have they been finessed? They were precipitated by a roadside bomb that killed an Israeli soldier patrolling outside Gaza, breaking the ceasefire. The finesse? Hamas denied responsibility for the bomb.

Expect a world-wide condemnation of Israel to erupt in response to the Israeli Air Force attack today across Hamas-ruled Gaza.  If that outrage is to be valid, however, it should place equal blame on Israel and the Hamas operatives who have been firing rockets into Israel.  Not because those rockets inflicted major damage to Israel, or constituted a clear threat to the state- they did not- but because they offered the rationale for the Israeli attacks.  Without the Hamas rockets, which achieved next to nothing strategically for Hamas, the IDF would not have been in a position to attack Gaza

The youth in the Middle East are in the majority and, like young people in America, just want to be free. They don't hate Americans. They don't even hate Jews. They save their distaste for the American and Israeli governments. At first glance one would say that Jared Cohen's "Children of Jihad" is a fascinating examination of the youth culture in the Middle East, but it is so much more than that. It is possible that somewhere in the book lies the answer to the question: Will there ever be peace in the Middle East? Young people are the future, and, according to Cohen, they are much more like us than we realize.