Due to inflamed religious and ethnic tensions, peace in ineluctable. Why the current confrontation has wider and deeper roots than the current Hamas / Israeli conflict?

Like everybody else, to avoid becoming involved in arguments as intractable as this conflict itself, most of us refuse to apportion blame or even to provide an opinion albeit muted. Adam Habib, the Wits University Vice-Chancellor has just become embroiled in such a fracas by tweeting his support for Hamas.

Rational informed discussion is impossible at any level and only protagonists from both camps will entertain debating the issues in the media. At best this has resulted in a stilted discussion of the issues instead of an open-ended debate.

To prevent myself from being inexorably drawn into a shrill impasse, I will not venture into an opinion other than I believe that Israel was provoked into a response. The events progressed as follows: Palestinian extremists murder three Israeli youths, Israeli radicals retaliate and kill one Palestinian child, Hamas responds by bombarding Israel with missiles and then Israel invades Gaza.

Hence Joe Klein, a Times Magazines correspondent, contends, “It is a just but bloody war.” His contention is that Hamas faced an existential crisis by losing the support of 3 key players: its own populace due to misrule, Egypt due its links with the Muslim Brotherhood – being siblings – and alienating Iran due to siding with the Syrian Opposition against the murderous Bashar Assad regime.

But in the Middle East this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Hamas played a diabolical game by provoking Israel as it calculated that the anticipated Israeli response would elicit support for themselves albeit at the expense of Gazan infrastructure and Palestinian lives. What the Middle East has taught us, human life is not sacred and is readily used as a political weapon.

A recent book by Greg Mills entitled Why States Recover deals with the wider Middle Eastern issues. Whereas internationally the Middle Eastern tensions are focused on the Israeli / Arab conflict, overshadowing this is the Shiite / Sunni rivalry.

Most Westerners assume that the disagreements between the Shiites and the Sunni are trifling, a mere difference of doctrinal interpretation of the Koran and the role of Muhammad’s descendants. I was rudely disabused of this notion when a Muslim caller onto the John Robbie Show on 702 Talk Radio about six weeks ago made the startling assertion on air that his fellow Muslims – Shiite or Sunni, I cannot remember which – were more worthy to be killed than Christians.

A Sunni, Saddam Hussein, fought a bloody war against a Shiite Iran at the cost of perhaps a million lives and gassed his own Kurdish people. Saudi Arabia funds Sunni movements such as the opposition parties to Bashar Assad of Syria and so the political intrigue continues.

The Western mind is unable to comprehend the level of intolerance towards fellow Arabs and the depths of their duplicity and treachery.

While the Israeli / Arab conflict dominates the headlines, the true suffering is being born by the hundreds of millions of other Arabs oppressed by brutal regimes where human rights and common human decency is not enjoyed by any.

With opaque agendas, the current conflict in Gaza is merely a manifestation of a wider malaise. The numbers of innocent civilians being killed by ISIS forces in Iraq and the brutal Assad regime in Syria, make this conflict pale into insignificance.

Yet the likes of Adam Habib will unreservedly condemn Israel for their killing of civilians in Gaza without uttering even a muted criticism of Hamas misdeeds or those of ISIS or the Syrian regime.

Such is the magnitude of hypocrisy in the world.

Such infertile and obdurate ground as that in the Middle East will not easily bear fruits of tolerance and compassion.

Their conviction that their religion exonerates them from perdition when committing heinous crimes such as converting a ten year old girl-child into a suicide bomber defies Western logic and the sanctity of human life.

Hence the future of the people of the Middle East will not be put on pause until the trees of intolerance wither away and are replaced by those of understanding.

Those seeds will require decades to germinate and through the wanton acts of recalcitrance, most will not readily survive, but given human capacity for forgiveness and understanding, in many generations hence, – long after my passing – such tender fruit will be plucked and savoured by humanity.

Only then will the Stop Button on mindless violence be pushed.

Until then, peace is a chimera. So endure the spectacle of unnecessary death being visited upon the innocents and the not-so-innocent.