December, 28, 2008
Barry Rubin , The Jerusalem Post
Nothing is clearer than Hamas's strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of "we win or you lose."

The cease-fire

Hamas ends a cease-fire giving it the peace and quiet it needs to build up its army and consolidate its rule over the Gaza Strip. Israel would deliver supplies as long as there weren't attacks. From a Western-style pragmatic standpoint, this is a great situation.

December 28, 2008
By Alan Caruba
Writing in May 2008 on the occasion of Israel's sixtieth anniversary, Fouad Ajami, a longtime observer and commentator of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, said that "The Arab imagination could never reconcile itself to the permanence of the Jewish state...stubbornly refusing to accept the verdict of what happened in 1948."

December 28, 2008
by Thomas E. Brewton
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert denounces spending borrowed money, apparently unaware that he is stepping on the party line.

Mr. Herbert is about as far left in his liberal-progressive ideology as any writer in today's mainstream media.  Yet he has glimpsed enough of the truth to identify consumption floated by excessive debt as a cause of our present economic woes.

December 28, 2008
Middle East Strategy at Harvard
Olin Institute :: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
by Steven A. Cook

The events in Gaza over this weekend present a number of internal and external challenges for the Egyptian government, again raising questions about Cairo's capacity to deal effectively with regional crises. Needless to say, the Israeli Air Force's offensive against Hamas coming soon after Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rebuffed Egyptian President Husni Mubarak's pleas for restraint in Gaza, reminds Egyptians of their manifest weakness.