British authorities ruling Palestine hanged several members of the underground Zionist Irgun organization in the 1940s following their conviction on charge of bombing and other violent attacks. Menachem Begin, former Irgun leader and later Prime Minister of Israel, reportedly told a former British Government minister that the executions had “galvanized” his group, which subsequently hanged several British soldiers in retaliation. Menachem Begin said the hangings “got us the recruits that we wanted, and made us more efficient and dedicated to the cause … you were not sentencing our terrorists to death, you were sentencing a lot of your own people, and we decided how many.”

It's called backlash, and it's common to right-wingers the world over. Just like 9/11 brought all the hard-liners together in this country. Escalation is, everywhere and for all time, a right-wing phenomenon. The solution is to reject right-wing demagogy. Sure, there will always be right-wingers agitating for hostility some place in the world. So we must remain alert to the clear danger that the right-wing presents while setting the conditions for minimizing right-wing influence. That's something right-wingers, obviously, can't accomplish.