A Deal With The Devil

Well, Gaza has been "Hamastan" for a week now. How's the Taliban on the Med taking shape?

***With the burning of churches, for starters:

Fatah leaders have appealed to Israel to halt security measures against Fatah gunmen in the West Bank and promised to continue their massive crackdown on Hamas there, Palestinian Authority officials here said on Sunday.

The appeal was delivered to the government via US and European officials who met with several Fatah leaders here in the past few days, the officials told the Jerusalem Post. ...

Leaders of the Christian community in the Strip expressed deep concern over the fate of the Christians living under Hamas. They said most of them wanted to leave the Gaza out of fear for their lives. An estimated 2,500 Christians live in Gaza City.

Abbas condemned the attack as barbaric and despicable, and blamed Hamas militiamen.

Wow. I didn't know there were Christians in any remotely significant numbers in Gaza. Still won't take Hamas all that long to kill them all, though. They've already trashed a convent.

I have to chuckle at Mahmoud Abbas, Yassir Arafat's PLO protege, condemning a terrorist attack against infidels as "barbaric and despicable". Methinks there's more than a little dab of professional jealousy behind those words.

If only the Israelis - and ourselves - could see him that way.


***Add Admiral Ed to that list as well. How the same man who adroitly captured the essence of the long time Palestinian strategy (the "triangle offense") of alternately playing Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad against Israel in two-on-one confrontations while the third pretended to go limp can fail to see the same template at work in the supposed Fatah-Hamas split is simply baffling:

Hamas has a problem that will start emerging in the coming days. It only had one real trump card to play against Fatah, which was its standing and military strength in Gaza. It could threaten Abbas with a military coup there and extort concessions from their superior bargaining position - but only while they held that trump card in abeyance.

Now that they have played it out, Abbas can cut loose the much poorer Gaza from his calculations. In the West Bank, where the Israelis maintain security, the standard of living is not as desperate. Moreover, by firing Hamas and outlawing them, he can restart Western aid to the Palestinian Authority. That influx of cash will make him much stronger than his Hamas rivals, and may help push a settlement in the West Bank that would have been impossible with Hamas as a partner.

Where to begin? Ask yourself a series of questions:

1) What put a crimp in the Palestinian Authority's revenue stream? Answer: the unexpected (by non-"realists") electoral success of Hamas in 2005 and 2006.

2) Is that the whole answer? No. Answer 1b: Yassir Arafat's plundering of PA coffers to the tune of over a billion smackers.

3) Do you see how #2 led to #1? Answer: After the second Intifada ran its course, Fatah was largely discredited even in the indefatigueably starry eyes of its Western subsidizers, and left functionally bankrupt by Arafat's wholesale thievery. Meanwhile, Hamas is gaining strength as a competitor to Fatah at an alarming rate. So Abbas gives the Bushies what they demand: "free and fair" elections, knowing full well that Hamas is going to win them. Hamas gets the Pal legislature while Fatah retains the executive. "Divided government," Muslim-style, which reached its inevitable fruition a week ago.

Conclusion: Now Hamas is ensconsed in Gaza while Fatah is entrenched in Judea and Samaria. Abbas can play the good cop and con a fresh fortune out of ourselves and the EUnuchs and use it to quietly rebuild Fatah's military strength, while Hamas has an Iranian-backed base right smack on the Mediterreanean coast from which they can operate with impunity throughout the region.

And the bonus? Both Pal factions have Israel effectively surrounded within her own territory.

Even if it's not strictly collusive, that's still the most spectacular "triangle" variant yet.


***The beleagured Bushies' reaction to the rise of Hamastan shows how intellectually exhausted this White House has become. A reality Caroline Glick absolutely denudes to the marrow:

Bush and Olmert will announce their full support for Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas's new government. The US will intensify General Keith Dayton's training and arming of Fatah forces. Israel will give Fatah $700 million. The Europeans and the rest of the international community will give the "moderate, secular" terror group still more money and guns and love. The US will likely also demand that Olmert order the IDF to give Fatah terrorists free reign in Judea and Samaria.

Olmert and Bush claim that by backing Abbas militarily, financially and politically they will be setting up an "alternative Palestine" which will rival Hamas's jihadist Palestine. As this notion has it, envious of the good fortune of their brethren in Judea and Samaria, Gazans will overthrow Hamas and the course will be set for peace — replete with the ethnic cleansing of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem of all Jewish presence.

[Yet] Fatah forces barely raised a finger to prevent their defeat in Gaza in spite of the massive quantities of US arms they received and the military training they underwent at the hands of US General Keith Dayton. Bush, Olmert and all proponents of the notion of strengthening Fatah in Judea and Samaria refuse to answer one simple question: Why would a handover of Judea and Samaria to Abbas' Fatah produce a better outcome than Israel's 2005 handover of Gaza to Abbas' Fatah?

They refuse to answer this question because they know full well that the answer is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the outcome can be better. They know full well that since replacing Yasser Arafat as head of the PA in 2004, Abbas refused to take any effective action against Hamas. They know that he refused to take action to prevent Hamas's rise to power in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. They know that the guns the US transferred to Fatah in Gaza were surrendered to Hamas without a fight last week. They know that the billions of dollars of international and Israeli assistance to Fatah over the past fourteen years never were used to advance the cause of peace.

They know that that money was diverted into the pockets of Fatah strongmen and utilized to build terror militias in which Hamas members were invited to serve. They know that Fatah built a terror superstructure in Judea, Samaria and Gaza which enabled operational cooperation between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror cells.

So why embrace the fantasy that things can be different now, in Judea and Samaria? Rather than provide rational arguments to defend their view that Hamas's takeover of Gaza is an opportunity for peace, proponents of peace fantasies as strategic wisdom explain vacuously that peace is the best alternative to jihad. They whine that those who point out that Israel now borders Iran in Lebanon and Gaza have nothing positive to say.

To meet the growing threat in Gaza, they argue that Europeans, or maybe Egyptians and Jordanians can be deployed at the international border with Egypt to stem the weapons and terror personnel flow into Gaza. To meet the growing threat in Lebanon, Olmert pleads for more UN troops.

Both views ignore the obvious: Gaza has been transformed into an Iranian-sponsored base for global jihad because Egypt has allowed it to be so transformed. Assisted by its Syrian-sponsored Palestinian allies, Hizbullah has rebuilt its arsenals and reasserted its control in southern Lebanon because UN forces in southern Lebanon have done nothing to prevent it from doing so.

No country on Earth will volunteer to fight Hamas and its jihadist allies in Gaza. No government on Earth will voluntarily deploy its forces to counter Hizbullah and Iran in south Lebanon. This is why — until they fled — European monitors at the Rafah terminal were a joke. This is why Spanish troops in UNIFIL devote their time in Lebanon to teaching villagers Spanish.

So why are Bush and Olmert set to embrace Fatah and Abbas today? Why are they abjectly refusing to come to terms with the strategic reality of the Iranian-Syrian onslaught? Why are they insisting that the establishment of a Palestinian state is their strategic goal and doing everything they can to pretend that their goal has not been repeatedly proven absurd? Well, why should they? As far as Bush is concerned, no American politician has ever paid a price for advancing the cause of peace processes that strengthen terrorists and hostile Arab states at Israel's expense. Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton had Arafat over to visit the White House more often than any other foreign leader and ignored global jihad even when its forces bombed US embassies and warships. And today Clinton receives plaudits for his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.

By denying that the war against Israel is related to the war in Iraq; by ignoring the strategic links between all the Iranian and Syrian sponsored theaters of war, Bush views gambling with Israel's security as a win-win situation. He will be applauded as a champion of peace and if the chips go down on Israel, well, it won't be Americans being bombed.

Don't be too sure about that, Caroline. But you can be certain of the bitter irony of the one-time "cowboy unilateralist warmonger" shrinking down into the same mealy-mouthed, Chamberlainian jihadi-appeaser (everywhere but Iraq, it seems, and even there probably not for long) as his predecessors. Only in the post-9/11 world it's even worse, because there really is no excuse for it.

There is, as Clubber Lang said in Rocky III, "a lotta mo" here, here, and here. But no discussion of this issue is complete without including more scathing rebukes from NRO's Andy McCarthy:

Abbas proceeded to urge a throng of 50,000 Palestinians to re-aim their guns at the “occupation” (that would be Israel) instead of turning them on each other: “[W]ith the will and determination of its sons, Fatah has and will continue,” he brayed. “We will not give up our principles and we have said that rifles should be directed against
the occupation.... We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation....”

That was less than six months ago — despite Administration assertions on Monday that Abbas is “a partner who is committed to peace.” And none of it was a surprise. When Abbas was seeking election in 2005, he declared to a cheering mob in Gaza that Palestinian terrorists being sought by Israel were “heroes fighting for freedom.”...

Such is the delusional U.S. looking-glass on Palestinian society that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration’s staunchest Abbas booster, told columnist Cal Thomas last October, “[Y]ou can look at any opinion poll in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent of the people will say they’re perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace.”

Come again? As it happens, recent polling actually turns out to be more reflective of common sense, which says that when you systematically rear a people on hatred and a cult of death, as Fatah has been so instrumental in doing, they grow up to be hateful and instinctively resort to savagery to settle their disputes. Thus we find that up to 93% of young Palestinian adults (aged 18 to 25) deny Israel’s right to exist — as compared with “only” 75% when the total population is factored in. Thus we find, moreover, that when not brutalizing Israelis, Palestinians now brutalize each other. The cold truth is exactly the opposite of the idyllic picture painted by the Administration — and given the bile that Abbas’s Fatah spoon-feeds Palestinian children, how on Earth could it be otherwise?

Why is the Administration supporting Fatah without demanding that it shred its Constitution and unambiguously recognize Israel’s right to exist, as Israel, in perpetuity? Why isn’t President Bush demanding that Abbas not only order the disarming of Hamas in the West Bank (which Abbas did only because Hamas is fighting Fatah, not because Hamas is a terrorist organization), but that he also disarm the al-Aqsa Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Because Abbas would be finished the minute he tried any such things. They are not what Palestinians want.

And they're not what Abbas himself wants, either. The only difference between Fatah and Hamas is one of competence at savagery. Which is most of why the latter won last year's Pal elections in the first place.

It goes to show that "democracy" isn't the magic elixer the President hoped it would be, either as a civilizer of backward Muslim societies or as a substitute for fighting the wider war against the global jihad more than half-heartedly and haphazardly. Its end result has not been the tantalizing mirage of "Orange" and "Rose" and "Cedar" revolutions in late '04/early '05, but a subverted Iraq and Afghanistan teetering on the edge of Iranian takeovers, a re-Syrianizing Lebanon with a rearming Hezbollah, a neoTaliban on Israeli territory, and the very notion of "foward deployment" against Islamist terrorists crumbling before our very eyes.

If you only fight half a war, you'll win none of it. Our enemies know that, and are going for our jugular. We, it seems, are incapable of learning.

The Israelis? That remains to be seen. But it's not as if they really matter anymore, other than as a carcass for Pal wolves to feed on in perpetuity, with the West serving as maitre 'd.