Please read Juan Cole running news on the Middle East about the recent events in Gaza and Israel. The present aggressive move by Netanyahu’s government started with the assassination last Wednesday of Ahmad Jabari, the Hamas military leader, as he was engaged in talks with Israelis about a serious truce. Baskin, who was one of these Israelis (he was the main force behind the negotiations regarding Shalit, the young soldier captured and held hostage for years by Hamas), thinks this assassination is short sighted. I think the miscalculations and failure by Netanyahu and the more extreme members of his government to drag the US into a war with Iran over its nuclear programs (though we are deeply involved, militarily and otherwise), and the new political landscape this creates (real difficulties the Israeli government may run into in parlaying its moral claims with the US government), have led to an attack on a secondary front, the Gaza front, beginning with the assassination of an enemy in the process of negotiating a truce. The new political situation in Egypt, eventually in Syria, plus the no-go on Iran, and finally the soon-to-come elections in Israel, this to my mind decided the present government of Israel to follow a politics of force that is doomed to failure both inside and outside Israel.