Who "Started" The Middle East Conflict?

In the American media, it is constantly repeated in every venue from Fox News to the New York Times that the current explosion of violence in the Middle East was "started" by the Palestinians, when Hamas fighters abducted Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Any close analysis of the events leading up to the current conflict, however, will expose this virtually unquestioned claim as completely absurd.

One day before the abduction of Cpl. Shalit, Israeli forces abducted two Palestinians -- a doctor and his brother -- in Gaza. These two remain in Israeli custody. Any claim that the abduction of Cpl. Shalit was unprovoked or in some way "started" the present conflict is thus shown to be mistaken. Those whose bias leads them to habitually blame Israel, such as Noam Chomsky, end their analysis here, claiming that this Israeli action constitutes the "beginning" of the conflict.

The abduction of these two Palestinians, however, is doubtless defended by Israel as a necessary measure in their ongoing fight against the militant Hamas. Hamas, then, would respond that their militancy is made necessary by Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel would respond that their actions are merely self-defense made necessary by a long history of terrorist violence against Israel. And so on and so forth...

The point of all this is that anyone who claims a single action of Israel or Hamas as any sort of unprovoked beginning to the current conflict is ignoring the obvious fact that the present upswing in violence is just an extension of the same violence that has plagued the Middle East for decades. The widely accepted American narrative of the current Middle East crisis always places the blame squarely on Hamas as the aggressor and instigator. The narrative prevalent in the Arab world (and among much of the Left), on the other hand, without fail finds a way to blame Israel for every upswing in the violence.

The only thing that can be deduced from all this is that ideologues and those with unrestrained biases find it convenient to arbitrarily announce certain acts as aggression and others as self-defense. The truth of the matter, which no one wants to admit, is that the violence is ages-old and self-perpetuating -- there have been very few acts by either side in decades that one could definitively categorize as pure aggression or pure self-defense in this conflict.

The truth of such ongoing violence is that reality does not fit into neat categorizations of "good guy" and "bad guy", "aggressor" and "defender". Untruthful, politically-motivated attempts to make such categorizations have little relation to the reality of the conflict, and serve only to further perpetuate the violence by denying any guilt or wrongdoing on the behalf of one's favored side. Both Israel and Hamas have committed horrific acts in the course of this war, as occurs in virtually every war. Only when both sides live up to their past wrong-doings and resolve to prevent future atrocities will any progress be made towards peace. The unlikelihood that any such admission of responsibility will occur in the current climate merely shows how far from peace we truly are.