"What did Hamas hope to gain from this latest round of fighting, which it started with a barrage of about 150 rockets into Israel? To formally translate Hamas’s recent strategic gains into a new, more favorable status quo with Israel. It works like this:

Hamas’s new strength comes from two sources. First, its new rocketry, especially the Fajr-5, smuggled in from Iran, that can now reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, putting 50 percent of Israel’s population under its guns.

Second, Hamas has gained strategic strength from changes in the regional environment. It has acquired the patronage and protection of important Middle Eastern states as a result of the Arab Spring and the Islamist reversal in Turkey.

For 60 years, non-Arab Turkey had been a reliable ally of Israel. The vicious turnaround instituted by its Islamist prime minister, Recep Erdogan, reached its apogee on Monday when he called Israel a terrorist state.

Egypt is now run by Hamas’s own mother organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is simply the Palestinian wing. And the emir of Qatar recently visited Gaza, leaving behind a promise of a cool $400 million."

Why Was There War in Gaza? - National Review Online


"I actually see this as constructive.

Post Arab Spring it will be events like this that lead to solutions."

-spence

Even for Kraut this is pretty out there.

-spence

Spence--You do realize that have said nothing meaningful here . . . "out there"? Where? Is there any "there" there in your comment? PLEASE ELUCIDATE!

The substance was in the nuance, please try and follow along.

-spence

Good point. My pedestrian mind that hankers too much for specifics finds it hard to follow along with meandering nuances. Oh, did you follow along with the nuance of my question about whether there was a "there" there in your nuance about Kraut. Perhaps you were meandering along about the out thereness of that tasty string-like sour cabbage. That can be far out stuff depending on what you had smoked before you ate it. Or maybe you had comparative visions of Germanic, Nazi-like, allusions lingering "out there" in the hammer's article. I try to follow along, but sometimes your nuances are so far out there that I cannot reach out far enough to grasp them. My problem, not your's. But keep in mind, a great mind such as yours may sometimes find it difficult to communicate nuances to the more simple-minded among us.