No, Hamas and Bibi don’t talk. They don’t need to. They each understand what the other needs to stay in power and consciously or unconsciously behave in ways to ensure that they deliver it.

Sometimes Thomas L. Friedman writes something really great. You know I think this. I just wrote that neither side, Palestinian nor Israeli, wants peace. I thought of Obama's statement in A Promised Land:

The  speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity--it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance...[a] pantomime, their lack of resolve...I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world they knew...violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

A world without illusions--that's what they'd call it. (emphasis original)

Those sentences are unequaled for perspicacity from any political I have ever read.

I don't know if I have ever written this because I don't generally put my silliness on the front page of this blog unless I can get a laugh. Ready? I remember watching an episode of Star Trek when I was a mid-teenager that made, manifestly, an enduring impression upon me. The Enterprise had encountered a world where two halves had been fighting for hundreds or thousands of years. It was all they knew, all their forefathers had ever known. Peace was unthinkable and unthought. A world without illusions. So the two sides came up with a condominium, every week or month a certain number of the X tribe would be handed up to the Y tribe to be killed and the next period some Y's would be handed over to the X side to even things out. The tribes' rationale was that this rationalized their conflict, kept the killing in an agreed channel which it could not run over the top but which also would never run dry. The X's and Y's thought they were the epitome of civilized behavior. Captain Kirk went bonkers on the tribes' leaders, the gist of which was, You can't normalize killing. Killing should be painful, to carry out and to absorb. Sorrow, grief...you get the idea. I remember Golda Meier saying of the Palestinians, "We forgive you for killing our children but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children."

Do the Palestinians and Israelis not seem like the X and Y tribe. They've come to an understanding, Friedman writes. It's not necessarily conscious behavior but they know, Okay, Hamas' leadership is taking shit, let's bomb them to shore them up. Okay, Netanyahu is hanging on for dear life, fire some rockets into Israel. It does seem they are playing assigned roles and afterwards shaking hands, "Good job, King Abdullah, Good job Abbad. See you in the next flare up." There is nothing the U.S. can do for peace in the Middle East if there is not the will to peace among the parties. What we can do is let them fight it out or resolve it or whatever the hell they're going to do without us giving one side 3.8B in military aid every year. Three point eight Bil/year every year is a pretty significant investment. Sort of like the Pottery Barn rule, you paid for it, you own it; if you break it, you have to clean it up. We've been doing that for 73 years.