By David K. Shipler 

                Themost obvious prediction this week, after Hamas fighters rolled easily from Gazainto the stunned villages and kibbutzim of Israel, would be this: Thesputtering hope for a Palestinian state has been finally extinguished.

Having seen their children, women,and elderly bathed in blood and taken to Gaza as hostages, Israelis will nevercountenance Palestinian statehood anywhere nearby, not in Gaza and least of allon the West Bank, which is even closer to the heart of the country--literallyjust down the street from the capital, Jerusalem, and many other towns.

                 Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from its militaryoccupation of Gaza in 2005, and the subsequent election of Hamas to rule thedensely populated territory, the sporadic rockets and infiltrations have underminedIsrael’s peace movement’s central concept. That’s been “land for peace,” a belief that oncePalestinians had their own territory, they would accept Israel as a neighbor. Well,Gaza residents got their land, but Israel got no peace. That’s been thesimplistic equation.

                Ofcourse it can be argued—and usually is, on the political left around theworld—that Palestinians didn’t really possess their land, that they weresuffocated and radicalized by Israel’s imposition of tight border controls thatrestricted imports and hemmed people into what some call an open-air prison.Wages are low in Gaza, and better-paying jobs in Israel are inaccessiblewithout a permit to cross the border. Even after Israel increased the number ofpermits in recent years, the Gaza unemployment rate stood at nearly 50 percent:a prescription for smoldering desperation and explosive fury.

                But thepartial blockade was itself a reaction--supported by Egypt along its borderwith Gaza—aimed at impeding Hamas from building an arsenal whose disastrousscope was displayed to Israel this week. In turn, that militarization of Gaza wasa reaction to Israel’s “colonial” oppression, as many Palestinians see it. And Israel’stough posture was itself a reaction to radical Palestinians’ ideology ofobliteration, which dreams of a final end to the Jewish state.

                And soon, one reaction to another to another ad infinitum. Untangling the causalrelationship depends on how far back in history you’re willing to go beforestopping and deciding that you have found the original sin.

                It’snot so hard to look backward. It’s harder to look forward. In that part of theworld, only prophets and fools are inclined to use the future tense. Prophetshave been scarce for quite a while. Fools have been in plentiful supply.

                Unexpectedconsequences seem to be the rule. Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day warof 1967, celebrated tearfully by Jews able at last to pray at Jerusalem’sWestern Wall, saddled the country with the unending dangers of containing hostilePalestinian populations in the captured West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s neardefeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war gave President Anwar Sadat of Egypt thestature, he thought, to make peace with Israel. Some have speculated that Hamas’smonstrous assault will give Palestinians the swagger to make eventualcompromises. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.

You never know, that should be themotto. And you need to be careful what you wish for. In 1981, it came to myattention that the Israeli government, confident in its ability to manipulateArab politics, was funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, aprecursor of today’s Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed byBrig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, who explainedthat he was under instructions from the authorities to build up the Brotherhoodas a counterpoint to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Communists, whosegoal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.

                TheBrotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfareservices for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemedbenign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood theByzantium of Gaza’s politics. A year later, Israelis made the same mistake inLebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramaticallyat realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.

                Significantly,an architect of both the Gaza and Lebanon schemes was former general ArielSharon, then defense minister. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the army’sunconditional withdrawal from Gaza, with no agreement or internationalstructure to keep some modicum of peace. Hamas rockets followed.

Palestinians have a rich history ofmiscalculation as well, and this Hamas attack seems destined to mark history withan indelible turning point. Israelis, it has been said, became complacent intheir material comforts and relative security in recent years. True, masses tookto the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculatethe judiciary, but Jewish-Arab violence precipitated by Palestinians and vigilanteJewish settlers, was mostly confined to the West Bank, with little terrorisminside Israel proper. The “situation,” in the anodyne euphemism, did not occupyeveryday worries.

In Gaza, Hamas lobbed occasionalrockets, which were mostly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missilesystem. As radical as the group’s objectives were—Israel’s annihilation—it seemedcontained, the two sides standing off in a hostile equilibrium. The Arabs’ conventionalorder of battle had been practically dismantled by peace treaties with Egyptand Jordan, internal disarray in Syria, and the aftermath of the US war inIraq.

The remaining threats came from non-stateactors—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—but they seemed manageable. Thencame the latest day of infamy.

What shift will this bring? “Hamaswas once a tolerable threat,” wroteHaviv Rettig Gur in the Times of Israel. “It just made itself anintolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weakto respond with the old restraint. . . . These heirs of a collective memoryforged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience ofdefenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everythingpossible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strengthto a sense of dire vulnerability.

“And it will soon learn the scaleof that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on itsborder; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resourcesworrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a morevulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.”

It seems a reasonable prediction.The page will be turned from heart-rending pictures of Israelis massacred and kidnappedto heart-rending pictures of Palestinians bombed and mangled in Gaza. Woe tothe fools who see only one page.