Shouldn't We Be Worrying About Civil War and Looking for the Root Causes of the Violence?

Maybe all that talk about searching for root causes, and all those warnings about civil war, weren't that far-fetched after all — except members of the Left were looking in the wrong direction.

Quoth Robert Tracinski:

Here is another report on the internal collapse of Palestinian society into anarchy and gang rule. Things are very bad in Gaza--and they are about to get worse. As it always does, reality is exacting its revenge: a society that elevated mass murder into an ideal is achieving its own suicide, instead.

The brains behind the The Intellectual Activist was referring to Craig S Smith's NYT article:

In Gaza City on Saturday night, one man was killed during a gun battle between armed militants and the police, while elsewhere in town another armed group threatened to destroy the local offices of the satellite television station Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai. The men were angry at the station for broadcasting a documentary that suggested that female Palestinian suicide bombers had been put under pressure by male relatives. Farther south that same day, gunmen cordoned off a neighborhood in Khan Yunis, Gaza's second largest city, while members of a well-known drug-smuggling family battled with the Palestinian police…. And in Rafah, along the Egyptian border, armed men from the Abu Taha family stopped cars on Sunday, checking identification papers in hopes of catching members of Al Masri, the rival family with which they have been waging a deadly feud….

"One day, these guys woke up and had nothing to fire rockets at, but they had no food in the kitchen, so they turned on the Palestinian Authority," said Khalid Abu Hilal, known as Abu Adham, a spokesman for 10 branches of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the Fatah political faction. "We are heading toward civil war." … Many people here believe that violence will eventually break out between Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade, and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, either because Fatah will force the elections to be postponed or because they will not accept the results if the elections are held and they lose.