Forget about love, plain hate and all the other avenues of behavior. One the chief driving forces in the human existence is revenge.

Whether to revenge a killing, theft, or perceived wrong, revenge will be mine.

Actually, most of the religious books on the subject citing Romans 12:19 read-“Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord.

Yeah, they pretty much leave revenge up to everyone’s god, basically after the offender’s death and rise and fall to concepts of heaven and hell.

Yeah, but that is unrealistic here on earth. Once the offended people, or entire populations can carry a grudge for decades, or even hundreds of years.

Revenge has a way of eating into the brains of the offended. It becomes a daily point of anger. It seems to be one of the chief themes of movies. The bad guys steal the land, the good guys  make them pay the price. The bad guys kill the beloved, the good guy kills him and dozens of extras.

After Word War II, the allies figured that setting up a homeland for persecuted Jews was a novel idea. "We’ll just slice out a bit of desert lands and deem it Israel."

Sounded like a good idea, a real problem solver, but there is always tit- for-tat. Somebody has to give something up when something new is created, especially in regards to land.

Unfortunately, this same scenario plays over and over again throughout the Mideast, South America, the Far East and even has some good old roots here in the USA.

Those damn Native Americans took  vengeance on the Lily White settlers trying to eke out a living on the land. Oh, sure, the Indians were pushed out of their lands, but hey, did they actually have a deed?

We will just call then squatters until the real owners take over. That same thing has replayed itself over and over, including in the disputed Middle East.

Land ownership is quasi-dictated, not by a necessarily signed  document, but his history of settlement. 

Which came first the chicken or the egg? Which came first/last, the Jews, or the Muslims...Indians or settlers...Serbs or Croatians?

When land come into play encumbered with ethnic cleansing, or massive deaths, the revenge mode takes on an extra level. 

The Palestinians felt down trodden by the powerful Israelis and passed that feeling down for generations. Hate becomes justified and infused in the children.

When protesting and throwing stones are not enough, guns, bullets, rockets, suicide bombers soon follow, all for the cause of vengeance.

That vengeance grows so wild that the killing of innocents becomes justified in the minds of maniacs. Women, children, the old, it really doesn’t matter as long as pain in infused in vengeance.

The problem is that throughout the movies and in life, vengeance never seems to win. Oh, sure the good guy knocks off the bad guy, but, in reality, who is the good or the bad guy? Too often it is hard to tell, but in the end, all suffer loss the loss of humanity.

I wish I could say that Hamas has taken cruelty to a new level, but history blunts that assertion. The difference this time is that it plays out, all on instant news reports - babies being beheaded, over 250 slaughtered at a music festival. 

What is scary about the scenario is the blank faces and too often smiles of the perpetrators. This is beyond revenge 101.

What is occurring in Israel and the  West Bank of Palestine, due to the terrorist group Hamas, will lead to thousands of lives lost and,in the end, will  not solve the problem, just put off for a number of years, the next generation.