The plight of the people of the Gaza Strip has shocked world opinion. The Israelis are bombing, rocketing and shelling and have now invaded a narrow slice of land that is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. They have killed hundreds and wounded many more. Inevitably, some of the victims (perhaps 20 percent) have been civilians. The Israeli government sees them as collateral damage - a military euphemism that includes women and children who happen to be too close to an intended target. The Palestinians call them martyrs.

Who started this deplorable, lopsided battle, and why? When will it end? To understand what is happening in Gaza you have to peel away the layers of propaganda, myth, political spin, distorted history and misunderstanding that hide the brutal reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the most obvious level, it was the Palestinians of Gaza who provoked the Israelis by refusing to renew a six-month truce before Christmas and fired hundreds of crude rockets at Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip. In fact, they had been firing rockets for years, even during the truce. When Barack Obama visited one of the targeted Israeli towns in July, he quite sensibly said, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect the Israelis to do the same thing.”

The Israelis did just that last week when they unleashed their military power in a long-planned offensive to stop the rocket attacks and cripple Hamas. The fact that Israel is holding a general election next month increased the pressure for action. Even left-wing Israelis (though not Israeli Arab citizens) were demanding action.

Of course the entire 1.5 million population of the Gaza strip is not responsible for firing the rockets. They are the work of militants backed by or at least tacitly approved by Hamas, the Islamist party that currently rules Gaza. But it is safe to say that most of the population applauds attacks on Israel.

If Israeli officials actually believe (as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insists) that their military onslaught will force Hamas to stop the rockets or persuade the population of Gaza to stop supporting Hamas, they are delusional. Each Palestinian killed in this crackdown strengthens political support for Hamas.
The Palestinians, too, are facing possible elections this year, and one of the main reasons the Islamist militants of Hamas provoked Israel into launching its offensive was to weaken the moderate wing of Palestinian politics. They wanted to show that only Hamas can stand up to the Israelis - by luring the Israeli armed forces into a war it cannot win.

Why can't Israel win? After all, in the first week of the assault, the Israelis killed roughly 100 Palestinians for every Israeli killed by the rockets. Yes, but the Palestinian militants have been able to keep firing rockets, and have even upped the ante by firing longer range missiles that have hit more distant towns, such as Be'er Sheba, which were previously out of range. The disproportionate number of Palestinians killed is a price Hamas is willing to pay in order to score political points.

It all sounds like a rerun of the disastrous Israeli aviation campaign and invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Then, it was rockets fired into Israel by another Islamist militant party, Hezbollah, that lured the Israeli army into a ground campaign. By managing to keep on firing rockets into Israel, Hezbollah shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility. It made the Israeli army look like losers.

One of the reasons Israel is now using such force against the Gaza strip is to restore the deterrent power of the Israeli Defense Forces. From a strictly strategic point of view, Israel doesn't need to be loved by its Arab neighbors. It needs to be feared.

Of course, the Israelis (like the Bush administration) would like to see regime change in Gaza, but that seems unlikely. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah party was defeated by Hamas in an election in 2006 and then driven out of Gaza by Hamas in 2007, would look like a traitor if he returned to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank. He has already offended his own supporters by cracking down on anti-Israeli protests in the occupied West Bank.

But once you have peeled away all the layers of this Middle East conundrum, you get to the heart of what it happening in Gaza and what it represents. I will quote what a Palestinian taxi driver said this week to a British reporter. The Palestinian was from East Jerusalem (living under Israeli control) and not from Gaza. He explained, “We have the right to fire those rockets because people (Jews) came and stole our land.”

That's the core reality of the Middle East conundrum. Two peoples believe they have a right to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Moderate Palestinians say they are willing to settle for an independent state with the old 1948 borders, but a Palestinian state geographically divided between Gaza and the West Bank would barely be viable. And the Israelis know the 1948 borders would put Jerusalem and Tel Aviv within easy rocket range of the Palestinians.

What's happening in Gaza now is part of that bigger, basic problem, to which there are no easy answers. This small Gaza war will go on until both sides can figure out how to end it without looking like they have lost. And the longer the war lasts, the more propaganda points Hamas will score. The fundamental problem will not be resolved. The end result will be another ceasefire after the loss of hundreds of lives.

If that's a gloomy outlook, at least it seems realistic. History teaches us that pessimism is the default view in the Middle East.