Let's Not Kid Ourselves

Submitted by Blackspeare (United States), Dec 2, 2007 at 18:08

Hamas enjoyed a brief electoral victory, which ought to have given them political control over the ragged remnants of the Palestinian entity, and hence the right to designate the spokesman for the Palestinian people. Their electoral victory was instead nullified in concerted military assaults by the forces of the PLO, backed - in what is surely among the most bizarre twists in modern diplomacy - by the US and Israel. As an answer to the Bush regime's assertion that our prime mission is to "democratize" the Mid-east, Israel jailed some forty of the duly elected Hamas parliamentarians and quarantined the Hamas-dominated Gaza strip----albeit Hamas was not particularly effective diplomatically.

Anyone close to the situation can see this tawdry Annapolis exercise as anything but domestic political theatre? The target audience here is the American public; no one in the afflicted region buys a line of it.

Mr Olmert foolishly asserts - in essence - that commingling the Palestinian and Israeli peoples into one multiethnic state would destroy the Zionist nation. Well, duh.

In this pronouncement - intended, one supposes, to appall a trembling world - he signals that the "right of return" is forever off the table. The "right of return" binds the Palestinians into the same sort of nationalist myth that "Zionism" binds the Israelis. The competing claims for sovereignty over Jerusalem are similarly self-sanctified and obdurate. Mr Olmert affirms that these two fiercely counter-poised ethnic belief structures are entirely antithetical. In short, there will never be a reconciliation.

There could some day be peace, certainly, but it will be the peace of the dead. Someone's going to lose, utterly. Absent a concerted Arab/Muslim will to confront the massed power of the US and Israel, the Palestinians can look forward to their own trail of tears.

The permanent presence of a US military mission in the region guarantees - explicitly - that there will never be a unified Arab/Muslim power.

The Israeli political strategy has been both remarkably disciplined and remarkably effective for some sixty years, now...Just keep stalling. With the continued material and military backing of the West, Israel will eventually force the Palestinian people and the tattered remnants of their aspirations to melt away into history.

The only likely role available to Syria and Iran in this drama will be to host the diaspora of a defeated Arab people.

Let's not kid ourselves.

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