WHY MUST THEY RESIST, DANGIT!:

Though we can't be sure why Hamas chose to launch this attack now, we do know that there are a number of background conditions -- including not just the ongoing occupation but also recent surges of conflict in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a far-right Israeli government, and Israeli-Saudi negotiations about normalizing relations -- that made the situation especially combustible.

And this leads to a second, more fundamental point: The conflict is not, as some have suggested, "stable" -- and likely never can be made so.

So long as Israel rules over the Palestinian population, violence will be ongoing and escalation inevitable. The only real way to prevent this kind of thing from happening is for the two sides to come to a mutually agreeable solution that addresses the root causes of violence.

Except today, any solution seems further away than ever. [...]

As combustible as this setup has been, Israeli leadership saw it as essentially the best arrangement available to them. They believed that they could reduce rocket fire to an acceptable level, relying on the Iron Dome missile defense system. Israeli troops and border security measures could prevent major cross-border raids.

Targeted killings and shows of force could deter Hamas itself from escalating too much, as they'd always bear the brunt of the suffering in a true war. These periodic strikes have been euphemistically termed "mowing the grass," a reference to the idea that the terrorist threat couldn't be eliminated but could be reduced to a tolerable level.

Today's events showed that these assumptions were badly mistaken.

Hamas was not deterred from attacking Israel, nor was it stopped by border security. It penetrated Israeli territory through land, sea, and air; once its forces entered, they rampaged through southern Israel. The streets of Sderot, a border town, are currently a war zone. [....]

Palestinian politics is defined, in large part, by how its leadership responds to Israel's continued occupation -- both its physical presence in the West Bank and its economically devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip. Hamas's strategy to outcompete its rivals, including the Fatah faction currently in charge of the West Bank, is to channel Palestinian rage at their suffering: to be the authentic voice of resistance to Israel and the occupation. The angrier Palestinians are at Israel, the greater Hamas's political incentives for violence.

And the past few months have seen plenty of outrages, ones even more significant than events in Jerusalem. Israel's current hard-right government, dominated by factions that oppose a peace agreement with the Palestinians, has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank. It has turned a blind eye to settler violence against West Bank civilians, including a February rampage in the town of Huwara.

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