In Western media the shockingly successful Hamas attack launched from Gaza is routinely compared to 9/11 or even Pearl Harbor, with all the odious negatives attached to those pivotal events, ruing fanatical foes for striking what is portrayed as a totally blameless target.

Playing with parallels is always a tricky and imperfect exercise, especially in world politics where, for example, major national leaders, when they calculate they have the upper hand, like to dismiss tedious diplomacy as Munich-style appeasement. Yet the far more apt comparison to the horrors in and near Gaza today, at least up to a point, may be the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in late January and early February of 1968.

One must be careful not to overdraw parallels, but in the dismal approach to the 1968 Tet holidays the US along with its South Vietnamese partners or puppets (depending on your viewpoint) was subjecting the free fire zones of the South Vietnam countryside to gruesome meat-grinder tactics, including a vast and brutal relocation programme, designed to rub out any trace of popular resistance ~ and all of it performed in the name of a democracy that never existed for the tormented population caught in the crosshairs. Innocent people were maimed and killed in droves every day.

Nearly three years into full-scale engagement (plus several earlier years of “advisor” and logistical aid after the French colonizers departed) US authorities bragged that the National Liberation Front was on the brink of being crushed. Victory shone brightly on the horizon. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at the time stated that every statistical indicator plainly testified that it was all over for the stubborn Viet Cong guerrillas.

General Westmoreland likewise burbled about seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnels that mattered ~ not unlike Gaza ~ were then ones the Vietnamese rebels traversed beneath a blasted, poisoned and heavily surveilled landscape. Based on such giddy and widely publicized reports, the American public, though growing a mite edgy and sceptical, maintained a majority in favour of the Southeast Asian intervention.

The US was only busy “mopping up” the remainder of this nagging sordid problem, defined entirely as a communist threat. Then came Tet. Debate rages on in military and academic circles as to the primary objectives of the combined NFL and North Vietnamese offensive that overran two dozen major South Vietnam cities, including a squad penetrating the US Embassy in Saigon. Were the inscrutable strategists aspiring to a total victory or else aiming to make a stark and gory statement that they were never giving up and had to be reckoned with. Probably both.

The bold and now exposed attackers were beaten back but the Pentagon Papers disclose that US authorities viewed the Tet assault as a much more “close-run thing” than they cared to tell the press. The NLF guerrillas certainly suffered high casualties, but they returned in May anyway in force with a so-called “mini-Tet” that inflicted an even higher toll on US and ARVN forces than the 1968 edition did.

The bottom line message, which the media could not mute, was that the US was not winning, no safe place existed in Vietnam, and the costs of continuing conflict only rose. Public support went up during Tet but afterward steadily dropped evermore.

Even the most kneejerk militarist Yanks saw the policy choice was ever more expensive action tantamount to genocide or else to get out with whatever dignity could be mustered. In 1969 President Nixon, after being thwarted by public opposition to his initial plans to escalate, began “Vietnamization,” thereby “changing the colour of the corpses” by phased withdrawal of American ground troops, and returning to the bargaining table and an ultimately ignominious exit. It all took too long a time to unfold, but for the Vietnamese resistance, by any measure, the Tet offensive was worth it.

At the time of Tet, incidentally, a US intelligence officer remarked that they wouldn’t have believed the enemy battle plan if it had fallen into their hands. Parallels always have their limits. Unlike the Vietnamese situation, the Palestinian resistance, led in this grim and bloody occasion by Hamas in Gaza, had no hope of winning, and operated in the utmost expectation of ferocious retaliation from Israel at the usual 10 or 20 to 1 kill ratio. What smoking embers would be left of Gaza?

With settlers relentlessly pouring into Palestinian land, Israelis choking the movement of local goods and people, enticing bids to Arab neighbours for a separate peace with Israel, daily violence, humiliation, an implacable ultra-right Israeli government under Netanyahu, a Palestinian space consisting of shrinking ink spots on a map, and a low ebb of international concern, there seemed nothing much left to lose.

What then did Israel, let alone all those formidable Israeli intelligence agencies, expect? If they were deceived, they deceived themselves. Under the dire circumstances, a great and terrible roll of the dice was always in the offing.

The Palestinians aren’t vanishing or being vanquished unless Israel performs acts of vengeance that are so disproportionate that even its heartiest supporters will have trouble stomaching it, let alone the rest of an aghast planet.

Buried within the awful events today is the dim but distinct possibility of a dawning realization ~ perhaps way down the line after the first spasmodic reprisals ~ that eventually a decent deal must be struck with the Palestinians (a temporary twostate status morphing into an eventual democratic one-state solution perhaps) or else no tolerable peace of the recent complacent and coercive kind shall ever be enjoyed by Israel again.

Glance at the immensely amicable Vietnamese-US relations today and ask why that conflict had to be fought at all. Why is it in the tortured Middle East that everything still seems too much to hope for?

(The writer is co-author with the late Sayeed Hasan Khan of Parables of Permanent War, No Clean Hands and many other books)