Home Again, Home Again

Jiggity Jig. Yes, first thing to check - from the plane - the boat’s still there. Then home on the bus. It didn’t seem that cold. Until we got in the house. Brrrrrr. A quick blast of heating needed.
A backlog of programmes on the TiVo box to wade through. Some serious, some not so much so, and of course, rolling news. 
The big news continues to be the middle east. After the appalling events of last weekend, the full horror of which began to become clear as the week wore on, we’ve been waiting for the inevitable response from Israel. Clearly Hamas didn’t think that by killing a thousand or so people that Israel would capitulate, nor that by firing thousands of rockets into civilian areas that Netanyahu would convene a peace conference. So what was the aim? Many have suggested it’s Iran’s aim of derailing Israel’s rapprochement with the Saudis, which it already has done. 
And much intelligent commentary seems to be increasingly realistic about the limits of any military operation. A Hamas guy who hides his weapon is otherwise indistinguishable from a Palestinian civilian. 
It’s a thorny one all right. 








"On Sunday 25 February 1996 a Palestinian student stepped onto a crowded bus in Jerusalem and detonated a bomb, killing twenty-six Israelis. One week later a second Palestinian detonated a bomb on a Jerusalem bus, killing eighteen Israelis. The following day a known Muslim extremist lay down on a busy street in Tel Aviv and blew himself up along with ten Israelis. These attacks were designed to undermine and halt what extremist groups viewed as the humiliating and misguided Palestinian-Israeli peace process, and within three months they had achieved this goal. On 26 May 1996 Israelis replaced Prime Minister Shimon Peres with the more hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, and soon thereafter negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority stalled. 
Although the bombings were clearly the work of a small band of Palestinian extremists, these extremists were able to convince a majority of Israeli citizens to walk away from a peace process most of them strongly supported…..

extremist violence is not indiscriminate or irrational as many people have assumed."



Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence
Andrew Kydd and Barbara F. Walter
International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 263-296 (34 pages)