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June 14, 2007

Confused Americans for Truth - Civil War in the Gaza Strip

You know, it takes some of the starch out of the idea that the problems in the Middle East can be solved peacefully if the Palestinians themselves can't work out their differences without a full-scale civil war.

The problem here is that since 2005, Hamas has been increasing its control over the Palestinian government. In the 2006 parliamentary elections, they got control of the Palestinian Legislative Council. This presented a serious problem for the Western powers, who have been funding the Palestinians since the resumption of the road map for peace in 2002. Hamas violates the two main precepts of the Road Map: it maintains a private army and it denies Israel's right to exist. I believe this is because Hamas is the political home of people who think Yasser Arafat was not violent enough.

The traditional solution to a country that's gone crazy is to impose economic sanctions. This was done last year, and while it was very successful in convincing the Palestinian people that there really is an International Zionist Conspiracy controlling the world, it has not caused Hamas to disarm or to decide that Israel deserves its statehood. Normally sanctions don't work because they're imposed on dictators who can make up for the revenue by stealing more stuff from the hapless citizenry. In this case the sanctions failed because a starving terrorist is more violent than a well-fed one. Cats understand this because the same principle works with rats, and that's why it was a huge mistake to not consult a cat before imposing the sanctions.

The goal of the United States foreign policy since the 1994 Oslo Accords has been the creation of a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. This has not worked because there is really no such thing as an ethnic Palestinian, any more than there is such a thing as an ethnic Yugoslavian. The Yugoslavians were simply the people who happened to be inside the lines drawn by the mapmakers at the end of World War I. Similarly, the Palestinians are the descendants of people who fled when the Jewish people in the region declared independence. (Iraq, by the way, has a similar problem, which is why we have Shi'ites and Sunnis staging terror attacks on each other in Baghdad.)

The fictional concept of an ethnic Palestinian continues to exist because it justifies a hatred of Israel: the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli oppression, and they deserve to get their home back. But the idea of Palestine only exists because it was full of Arabs and the Jews wanted it back. From the day the Ottoman Empire fell, that has been the sole difference between Palestine and every other piece of land in the entire region.

Hatred is good politics. The Democrats swept into office in 2006 with a mandate to do things differently, but once it became necessary to decide which different thing needed to be done, the mandate descended into chaos. So it is that Hamas, whose platform is hatred, enjoyed a legislative victory, and despite hopeful signs in March, we've dissolved into chaos.

This is why hate is a bad thing.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Thu 6:44 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (3) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: conservative Gaza Strip Hamas Iraq Israel Palestinians terrorism War and Peace

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Tracked on June 15, 2007 11:46 AM

Comments

Posted by: Debbie at June 14, 2007 6:59 PM

Posted by: Ferdy at June 14, 2007 7:34 PM

Posted by: Scott at June 16, 2007 4:58 PM