	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jun-06
Israeli armed forces mass on Gaza border after soldier's kidnapping

Web Log - June, 2006

Israeli armed forces mass on Gaza border after soldier's kidnapping

Egyptian mediators are attempting to head off a "large scale military offensive" by Israel to recover the kidnapped soldier.

The soldier was kidnapped by Hamas' military wing. There is a security fence along the border between Gaza and Israel, but the Hamas cells spent several weeks digging a tunnel, 530 meters (580 yards) long, underneath the security fence. On Sunday morning, the cell crossed through the tunnel into Israel and caught an Israeli tank with three soldiers by surprise. Using anti-tank weapons, the Palestinians killed two soldiers, and kidnapped the third.

Palestinians are generally thrilled by this and Israelis are furious -- not only at the Palestinians but also at their own IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) for permitting it to happen.

As I've written about repeatedly on this web site, but no pundit, journalist or analyst seems to be capable of understanding, is that political events in the Mideast are "attracted" (in the sense of a "chaotic attractor" in Chaos theory) to war.

Events prove this out almost every day. Tensions have been boiling among Palestinians and Israelis, and the situation has gotten worse on almost a daily basis.

You can go back 16 months to the election of Mahmoud Abbas as President, and almost every day since then you can find some event that brought the region closer to war, but rarely an event that helped the (laughable) "peace process."

The current crisis has wide ramifications, even if the Egyptians can work their magic and find a way to talk the Israelis out of military action in Gaza:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh were in the midst of complex negotiations which might have led to power-sharing agreement between Fatah and Hamas. It was thought that the negotiations might even lead to an agreement to recognize the state of Israel. That's not going to happen now, any time soon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been pressing to move forward with his "convergence" or "consolidation" plan. Under this plan, many Israeli settlements in the West Bank would be closed down, and consolidated with settlements closer to Jerusalem. As a by-product, the result would be a de facto unilateral setting of Israel's borders, something that has drawn mixed or hostile reaction from the West.

Last year's Israeli unilateral evacuation of Gaza was widely praised when it happened, but Olmert will now be under even more pressure to make no further concessions to the Palestinians.

Any international agreement to restore aid to Palestinians will now remain off the table for the time being.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is now going to be under enormous pressure to bring Hamas violence under control, but if he tries, the result would be violence, possibly leading to civil war, between the Fatah and Hamas militias.

Obviously, the terrorist cells that carried out this kidnapping, had some or all of these results as objectives.

One thing that people don't understand is that during a generational crisis period, young people have no fear of war. That's true of young Americans, just as it's true of young Israelis and young Palestinians.

The median age of the entire population of the Gaza Strip is 15.6, and yet not one news or analytical article ever mentions this fact, or its consequences. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or know anything about Generational Dynamics to understand that a media age of 15.6 means that the Gaza strip is being run by children. We know that young people in the US get all their news from the Comedy Channel, and we can assume that young people in the Gaza strip get their news from something similar. And so, the Gaza strip is not being run by Abbas or Fatah or Hamas -- it's being run by children who learn about world events from the Palestinian Comedy Channel.

You can see the consequences here. Even if Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh would like to see the Israeli hostage freed (and he says that he would), it's not up to him. It's up to the children who are holding the hostage, and it depends on whether Haniyeh and the Egyptian mediators can threaten or seduce or cajole these children into freeing him.

The children holding the hostage belong to Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Islamic Army.

This group is demanding the release of hundreds of Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails, in exchange for release of the hostage.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected the demand, saying that, "The time is approaching for a comprehensive, sharp and severe Israeli operation. We will not wait forever. We will not become a target of Hamas-terrorist blackmail."

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the "attraction" of day to day political events to a state of total war appears to be accelerating. It was fairly slow in the period following Yasser Arafat's death, and really began to speed up following the Israeli evacuation of Gaza. Today, events in the Mideast appear to be spiraling out of control very rapidly. (26-Jun-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jun-06 Israeli armed forces mass on Gaza border after soldier's kidnapping

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jun-06
Israeli armed forces mass on Gaza border after soldier's kidnapping