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While the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement is as determined as ever to kill Israelis, the scale of Israeli-Palestinian violence in recent years barely registers as an armed conflict by today’s regional standards. Even the July-August 2014 Gaza war — the big exception to this period of relative calm — was far outpaced by bloodletting in Syria and Iraq that summer.

Moreover, unlike these other regional bloodbaths, this old-school slugfest between Israelis and Palestinians is not threatening to overturn the status quo. Every few years, Israel smashes Hamas’ military infrastructure sufficiently to ensure a few more years of relative quiet (“mowing the lawn,” as they say), which Hamas provokes in order to burnish its stature as a resistance movement, raise loads of money from the Arab world, and rationalize its heavy-handed rule in Gaza. In between, both sides find ingenious ways to harm the other without violating the truce. The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement used to play the same game with the Israelis until it got sucked into the Syrian meat grinder.

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This cycle of episodic violence is tragic, but it’s a fairly stable equilibrium so long as all stakeholders consider it minimally preferable to an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza. It’s an issue of concern that ranks well behind the surrounding Arab Levant’s self-immolation, Iran perched on the precipice of producing nuclear weapons, Russia intervening in the region with reckless abandon, Turkey’s bid to unite Sunni Arabs under its wing, and myriad other dangers.

Of course, we should do what we can to help Israeli-Palestinian peace, condemn egregious acts of violence, and blunt misguided European and Arab diplomatic initiatives likely to make things worse. But Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to get used to a brave new world in which the particulars of their fight don’t matter that much to the rest of us.

They should take it as a compliment.

National Post

Gary Gambill is a research fellow at the Middle East Forum.