Promise Land

Let me see if I can combine all of this into one, long, run-on sentence. Here goes {cracking knuckles}:

The same Fatah that claims to have developed chemical and biological weapons and has threatened to use them against Israel and the same Hamas (assumedly) that has tunneled from Gaza into what remains of Israel and launched fresh attacks, and which are reportedly waging Palestinian civil war against each other, have now joined forces on a plan to "implicitly" recognize Israel.

Gee, that wasn't as long as I thought it was going to be. But then neither will be this latest "peace" dodge.

I can't help but wonder how one "implicitly" recognizes a country. Isn't that one of those either/or kind of things? You might have pre-conditions that need to be met before you extend recognition, but until then you still don't recognize them, right? So what in blazes does this mean?

Here might be a clue:

The plan....calls on militants to limit attacks to areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast War and calls for formation of a coalition Palestinian government.

Well, gee, they're already violating that with Hamas' Gaza antics, as well as regular and daily rocket attacks into Israeli cities. Sounds to me like the standard carrot/stick and good cop (Fatah)/bad cop (Hamas) gambit, the twin objectives of which are to (1) regain access to Western aid cut off in the wake of Hamas' election triumph last winter and (2) resume bulldozing the West into bulldozing the Israelis back inside the indefensible pre-1967 frontiers that encouraged the surrounding Muslim states to launch three separate invasions in the restored Jewish state's first twenty years of existence.

And it'll work, too, provided Hamas drops its brain-dead intransigence. I don't share Cap'n Ed's belief in the Israelis' willingness to act in their own self-defense, even in the face of a Palestinian WMD attack. Nearly sixty years under siege has worn them down to the point where they will do just about anything for a "peace" that becomes more elusive with each successive round of concessions and retreats.

Wasn't withdrawing from Gaza supposed to be a giant step toward "peace"? A "masterstroke" by Ariel Sharon that would give the Pals the chance to prove whether they could govern themselves responsibly and live in peace with their Jewish neighbor? And what has been the drearily predictable result? See above.

I ceased to understand Israeli thinking twenty-four years ago when Menachem Begin had Yassir Arafat and the PLO at the IDF's mercy in Beirut and yielded to American pressure to take his foot off Arafat's throat. Up to that point the Jewish state was hardheaded, acutely realistic, and acted in the interests of its own survival regardless of "world opinion." As Prime Minister Golda Meir once put it, "We will not die so that the world will think better of us."

After allowing the PLO to flee into exile in Tunisia for a few years came U.S. recognition of Arafat, the beginning of the "peace process," and it's been all downhill since then. I would never have believed that the Israelis would ever allow their diminuitive country to be disembowled to make room for their blood enemies to move in right next to them. Again, the results have been drearily predictable, and the lessons they teach utterly over the heads of Western diplomats and now even the Israeli leadership.

Hamas' lone mistake is that they have been too stubbornly open in their bloodthirsty hostility and accompanying motivations for the facade of the comforting delusion of the "peace process" to be maintained. Mahmoud Abbas is merely trying to get them to shut up, put on their masks, and get with the program.

If they do, they'll find the beleagured Israelis more than willing to braid their own nooses, and the West, including us, standing ready at the trap-door levers.