Three days ago, Ali al-Julani of Jerusalem stepped out of his car in front of the Israeli Defense Ministry.

Smoking a cigarette, he leveled his automatic rifle at the 10 off-duty guards taking their lunch break and fired at as many as he could.

The guards said he looked directly at all of them as he fired, and the only indication he was attempting to murder as many people as possible was that his cigarette began to dangle from his mouth.

Last Friday, a Northern Irish nationalist set off a 40-kilogram bomb in a Saab he parked in downtown London.

He set the bomb to explode just after midnight in a district loaded with bars and clubs that would have just closed, so as to cause the maximum damage to the greatest number of random people as possible.

As a political science student, it is often my job to analyze conflict. Conflicts such as these two might require a lifetime to fully understand and explain. And even after all of that, I doubt I would ever be able to put myself in Ali’s shoes and understand his desperation.

The only conflict I would really say I have a firm academic understanding of is going on right now in Colombia. For one of my classes last semester I had to do a research project into the history of this civil war that has been perpetuated since the 1800s.

In my final paper I ended up having a lot of points taken away because I failed to explain the primary differences between the Liberal and Conservative factions in the Colombian government. I never explained what the two sides stood for and what the fighting was all about.

When I looked back I found the differences were relatively minor. But that didn’t stop them from spending the next 100 years trying to kill each other. The people with the original conflict were long dead, but the fighting still continued even though most people had forgotten what it was about.

One of my roommates listens to Rush Limbaugh on the radio every day. And yet he and I are able to share the same house, the same living room, the same kitchen and spend most of our time together laughing, even though we are bitterly, ideologically opposed.

Jews and Arabs once lived peacefully together in present-day Israel for almost 400 years until the Christians invaded in 1095 with their “Love Jesus or Die” campaign.

Once the two groups were brutalized and displaced, they ceased to really know each other. But that still didn’t stop them from living in relative peace in the same region until the middle of the 20th century.

Some would say all of this fighting, all of these protracted conflicts that have been going on for so long continue because people can’t agree.

But I don’t think so.

People can disagree about the most fundamental issues and still avoid fighting. At this point, the Israelis conduct their military campaigns to combat Palestinian terrorist attacks. And the Palestinians conduct their terrorist attacks out of desperation brought by the Israeli military campaigns.

And both are correct.

Again, I’m not trying to say they don’t have a difference of opinion. Of course there are issues they disagree about, just like the Irish Catholic minority in Northern Ireland wants independence from Great Britain.

But is that what this is really about? Last Friday’s London bombing was conducted by a group called the “Real” Irish Republican Army. It calls itself this because the old Irish Republican Army has all but laid down arms. The IRA has gotten the Brits’ attention, and it’s ready to sit down at the negotiating table and end the conflict.

But the “Real” Irish Republican Army isn’t interested in working toward a compromise with the majority around it. It’s interested in killing more random Londoners strolling home from the bar.

It does this, I think, because it’s grown used to it, and it enjoys it. I see no other reason to indiscriminately kill when you are so close to your “goal.”

They fight because they are embracing the more basic instincts of life. They fight for the same reason ants and termites fight.

Humans are more sophisticated, so we have a name for it. We call it vengeance.

Whatever you call it, it’s been going on since the beginning of life itself. All the species around us arose from competition. Life is competition. And in this competition, the winners live and the losers die.

And until one side embraces that extra “whatever” it is that makes us human and stops the vengeance, we will be left with the world we see around us.

Andrew Banyai, a political science and pre-law senior, can be reached at banyaian@msu.edu.