The problem in the Israeli/Hamas conflict that is not present in all conflicts, is that where religious extremists are in positions of influence or power, is that matters are exponentially worse when both sides are led by religious zealots. Neither side wants to compromise with the devil. That is crucial to making the conflict there a wicked problem.
Fintan O’Toole in his article in the New York Review of Books, described the situation this way in his article:
“In the Book of Judges, where we find the Samson story, God has delivered the children of Israel into subjugation by their enemies as punishment because they “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.” As it happens, Hamas’s forebearers, the Muslim Brotherhood, held the same belief. The Harvard scholar of the Middle East Sara Roy tells us that, after Israel’s victory in the war of 1967, “the Brethren in Gaza especially remained convinced that the loss of Palestine was God’s punishment for neglecting Islam.” It seems that God has a peculiar way of chastising his various chosen peoples in Israel and Palestine: by inflicting them on each other. With millenarian religious believers in power on both sides of the Gaza wall, it seems that this blood-dimmed vision is again being played out as reality.”
This reference to “blood dimmed vision” may be an allusion to the words of an Irish Poet, William Butler Yeats in his famous poem “The Second Coming.”
No one understands the toxic blend of religious extremism and politics better than the Irish. Sadly, they have a wealth of experience that informs the opinions of people like Fintan O’Toole and William Butler Yeats and others. Yeats put it this way in that poem which he wrote nearly almost exactly 100 years ago:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
That is precisely the point. When the religious zealots are left loose the innocents will indeed be drowned. Vision on both sides will be blinded by blood.
There was a powerful example of that today. Israel bombed a refugee camp—the largest in Gaza—when it was “aiming” at a place where a Hamas leader or two was believed to be. They missed. I don’t yet know how many civilians were killed.as a result. How many civilian deaths would it take before such an attack would be a war crime?