Life how in Palestine is changing

Johann Hari has an interesting article reviewing a book on his blog about how the Palestinian struggle is changing from a nationalist fight to an Islamist one:

"Nationalism is, of course, far easier to deal with, because nationalists are merely bidding –however aggressively – for real estate. Jihadism is, by contrast, unquenchable. They are bidding for souls."

is a good quote relating to the simple problem of dealing with fundemetalists. They simply cannot be a bargined with the way that a nationalist can. The IRA could be coaxed into sharing power with the Loyalists, as they do not see this a stepping stone that can be used. They are not bound by god to require that all of their demands be met before any negiations can take place. All they want is political power so the negociations can come first and lead to there demands being met.

"This vision of Gaza and the West Bank [seen by the authors of the book the article is about] should be strangely familiar to inhabitants of Los Angeles. The graffiti; the tribal warfare; the random violence; the misogyny; the reverence for death and the fetishisation of slain young men who lived fast and died young – sound familiar yet? When African-American young men are choked off from economic opportunity, when they have no way to advance but through crime, when they feel they have no safe space to call their own, they form gangs, create alternative value structures, and behave like maniacs. Are Hamas and Islamic Jihad so different to the Bloods and the Crips, except that they operate in even more extreme circumstances? Perhaps the most revealing moment in ‘The Road to Martyrs’ Square’ is when Ali, a friend of the authors, watches a pirate copy of Boyz N The Hood. He is entranced; afterwards, he refers to his own pathetic slice of the West Bank as his “hood”, without a trace of irony."