The blades have been spinning and the colon filling in the Middle East since before I was born, but now the crap has really hit the fan. Palestinians have been detonating themselves in Israel at a rate of about one a day, and now their ranks are being refilled not by crazy zealots, but by young men and women of relatively sound mind and body, men and women a lot like you and me.
Israel’s dim-witted response to these suicide bombers is to blow up Palestine — literally. With American tanks and helicopters, they’re demolishing the entire infrastructure of the PLO, as well as anything or anyone unfortunate enough to be within a stone’s throw of one of its targets.
The suicide attacks are a direct result of years of oppression by Israel (whether or not this oppression is justified is another topic altogether), so it stands to reason that harsher oppression will only yield more college-aged kids with more C4 stuffed down their drawers sneaking through Israeli checkpoints. This, in turn, will yield more angry tanks and helicopters and explosions, which will yield more bombers, and so on and so forth. They are caught in a violent, vicious cycle, and neither side is willing to do what is necessary to break it. They’ve given up. So they fight.
Maybe the real problem here, in the eyes of the rest of the world, is the unevenness of the fight. With our help, Israel has become almost a world military power (they’ve got nukes, for Christ’s sake). Palestine is a giant refugee camp. When one side of a conflict has a standing army and heavy artillery and the other splits a half-dozen AK-47s and a pile of rocks, eyebrows will be raised.

Most of those eyebrows are big, bushy black ones in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Israel’s Arab neighbors. The citizens of each of these countries are pressuring their leaders to take action against the bullies next door. This “war” will spill over if left alone. It’s only a matter of time.
If stopping a bloody, senseless conflict isn’t incentive enough to get us more involved, maybe salvaging our foreign policy goals is. Before this thing flared up, we had a nice “coalition” against terror. Saddam Hussein has promised to give financial assistance to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine, essentially encouraging parents to allow or even persuade their children to strap on explosives, run into a crowd of Israelis and turn them into ground beef. He has publicly promoted terrorism of the nastiest order, and we can’t do a damn thing to stop him. He knows the rest of the Arab world told Dick Cheney to piss off when he sought support for action against Iraq. He knows they have his back — now he’s rubbing our face in it.
Israel and Palestine are acting with all the civility, wisdom and restraint of four-year-olds fighting over the last grape lollipop. Someone has to separate them, stick their noses in opposite corners of the room while their mess is cleaned up. We have the money, the leverage, the troops and, unlike some other closer industrialized nations, the backbone to do the job. If we don’t, someone a little less objective might.