Once again violence has spiked between Palestinians and Israelis; a surge that might well be hard to quell given the chaotic, random, crude, and brutal forms it has taken. There is still an alarming amount of commentary that attributes blame for the violence primarily or solely to one side or the other. More enlightened observers acknowledge that political conflicts are complex, that they have histories and scripts, and that they play out in reinforcing cycles u2013 such that any specific act of violence cannot be understood out of its contexts.