Following revelations that Australian passports were used in the Dubai assassination of a  Hamas bigwig, most likely by Israeli intel agency Mossad, Geoff Pahoff has kindly allowed Webdiary to use this comment as a threadstarter.  Over to you!

I've never really gone along with the "cycle of violence" theory. Sure I can appreciate the appeal of the " both sides are wrong" default position often adopted by those who feel they have to have an opinion on this messy subject but want to be relieved of the burden of actually knowing anything about it. Life was meant to be lazy. "A plague on both your houses" sure qualifies as lazy. And impeccably neutral too, especially if you're into moral equivalence. Nothing more to think about. But let's face. It really is bullshit in its purest form.

If the terrorist and existential threat ended tomorrow, Israel's attacks on Hamas (and therefore Iran) would end tomorrow and the Palestinians would get their state. If Israel's attacks on Hamas ended tomorrow, the terrorist and existential threat would continue unabated and the Palestinians would never get their state. In fact the threat would worsen. There is no cycle.

It has become a cliche unfortunately but Hamas is a truly fascist organisation and Iran has a fascist regime in every sense. This is fact. Its roots are in the ideology of the Nazis. I mean this literally. There is a direct link through the"Muslim Brotherhood". [1] Of course they are a threat to Israel and the Jews. But they also enslave the Palestinian people as surely as the Nazis enslaved the Germans.

Here's some justifiable moral equivalence. Killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 is roughly equivalent to killing Heinrich Himmler in 1938. True.