No conflict quite raises voices, fists and guns; makes blood boil and reduces all elements of a logical, civil argument into a seething emotional fury like the relentless stand-offs, cease fires and attacks between Israel and Palestine. Practically every political pundit in the world is weighing in on the debate this week while the Israelis and Palestinians get stuck into each other. Crikey has gathered some of the best commentary from around the globe. From either side of the debate, this is what the wonks reckon:

Why Israel attacked. Hamas’ strategic miscalculation in rejecting an extension to a six-month truce with Israel was a gift on a “golden platter” to Israel, as Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit wryly noted. The Israeli security establishment has been intent since its flawed 2006 war in Lebanon to reassert Israel’s hegemony and its deterrent power. But the attack on Gaza may also have deeper causes. Lost in most of the coverage is the fact that the Israel-Hamas truce was working—a fact fully acknowledged in a recent intelligence report released by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to that report, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.” Furthermore, “the lull was sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell fire carried out by rogue terrorist organizations in some instances in defiance of Hamas.” Why would Israel want to end the truce? — Harpers Magazine

Orwell, blinding tribalism, selective terrorism, and Israel/Gaza. There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than “Terrorism,” the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term. But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing: slaughtering innocent civilians in order to “send a message,” to “deter” political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and — best of all, from the Terrorist’s perspective — even their own children and other family members. To the Terrorist, by definition, that innocent civilians and even children are killed isn’t a regrettable cost of taking military action. It’s not a cost at all. It’s a benefit. It has strategic value. Goldfarb explicitly says this: “to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause.” That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It’s the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings. And it’s the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including — one might say, at least in Goldfarb’s case: especially — children. — Salon

It breaks my heart to see Israel’s stupidity. Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond. But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas’s indiscriminate bombing of population centres is a crime against humanity, so is Israel’s killing of civilians (at least 130 so far in Gaza, not to mention the thousands in the years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza). Hamas had respected the previously negotiated ceasefire except when Israel used it as cover to make assassination raids. — Times Online

Hamas and its liberal supporters are responsible for the current crisis. Hamas’ covenant is not about achieving a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but about replacing Israel with a Palestinian state and pushing the Jews into the sea. It is not just Hamas’ covenant that commits it to this goal, but its murderous actions. We in the West live in an environment dominated by situational ethics. We tend to believe religion is either irrelevant or allegorical. We increasingly lack the cultural impulse to defend anything. We are incapable of understanding a zealous movement like Hamas. We think that Hamas is like the Irish Republican Army or the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. With such organizations there is the prospect of compromise, if not conciliation. Such groups deal in tangibles. Hamas traffics in eschatology. — American Thinker

William Kristol: Israel, Hamas – and Iran. The Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza is going to be a replay, we’re told, of the attempt to subdue Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006. And the outcome, it’s asserted, will be the same: lots of death and destruction, no strategic victory for Israel and a setback for all who seek peace and progress in the Middle East. Obviously, war is an unpredictable business, so I say this with some trepidation: I think the conventional wisdom will be proved wrong. Israel could well succeed in Gaza. — International Herald Tribune

Kristol blue extrapolation. Leave it to Bill Kristol to take the situation in Gaza–a necessary corrective action on Israel’s part, I believe (with a few caveats)–and transform it into a call for war with Iran. Kristol is doing several dreadful things here. First, he is defining Israel’s operation in the starkest possible terms–victory or defeat–without defining either. To my mind, a clear-cut Israeli victory would be the end of rocket attacks from Gaza (as was accomplished on Israel’s northern border, a little-noticed victory in the 2006 war with Hezbollah) and the cessation on weapons-smuggling through the tunnels on Gaza’s border with Egypt. It will not be the elimination of Hamas or the end of Hamas rule in Gaza. That’s not going to happen. And so the clearest path to an Israeli victory is a negotiated cease fire of the sort offered by France and rejected by Israel last week–which was Israel’s first major mistake in what has been a well-planned campaign. — Swampland @ Time Magazine

Iran’s postmodern beast in Gaza. Israel’s attack on Gaza is, in effect, an attack on Iran’s empire, the first since its offensive on Iranian-backed Hezbollah in 2006. That attack failed for a number of reasons, not least of which was Israel’s poor intelligence on Hezbollah: historically, its intelligence on the Palestinians has been much better. Moreover, this attack seems more deliberately planned, with narrower, publicly stated aims – all in all, a more professional job. But there is a fundamental problem with what Israel is doing that goes to the heart of the postmodern beast that the Iranian empire represents. To start with, Hamas does not have to win this war. It can lose and still win. As long as no other political group can replace it in power, even as some of its diehards can continue to lob missiles, however ineffectually, into Israel, it achieves a moral victory of sorts. — The Atlantic