The Silver Lining

Emanuele Ottolenghi, "Hamas Without Veils No more hiding behind the PA," National Review online writes that with Hamas in control of the Palestinian government:

There will be no excuses or ambiguities when Hamas fires rockets on Israel and launches suicide attacks against civilian targets. Until Tuesday, the PA could hide behind the excuse that they were not directly responsible and they could not rein in the "militants." Now the "militants" are the militia of the ruling party. They are one and the same with the Palestinian Authority. If they bomb Israel from Gaza — not under occupation anymore, and is therefore, technically, part of the Palestinian state the PLO proclaimed in Algiers in 1988, but never bothered to take responsibility for — that is an act of war, which can be responded to in kind, under the full cover of the internationally recognized right of self-defense. No more excuses that the Palestinians live under occupation, that the PA is too weak to disarm Hamas, that violence is not the policy of the PA. Hamas and the PA will be the same: What Hamas does is what the PA will stand for.

Not only is this new development, a problem for the Palestinians but also the neighboring Arab countries which having been militarily defeated by Israel before, used the Palestinians as surrogates in their on-going war on the Zionists.

Meanwhile, Hamas will have to confront the Egyptians (and the Jordanians) and tell them what the PA under Hamas now stands for. And Egypt and Jordan will have to change course, accordingly. Egypt has an increased military presence along the Gaza border and several officers in Gaza to help "stabilize" the security situation — which so far has meant keeping the flames low enough not to bother Egypt but high enough not to let Israel off the hook completely. What will Egypt do now? Cooperate with Hamas in Gaza while it dreads Hamas’ twin, the Muslim Brotherhood, at home? Will it act more decisively to stop the ever growing flow of illegal weapons being smuggled into Gaza from the Sinai, or turn a blind eye even as the increased militancy in Gaza might embolden the Brotherhood in Egypt? No more ambiguity for Egypt either.

Much of the press is asking what these events mean to the peace process. What peace process? There was no peace process, only a patient ethnic-cleansing war of periodic aggression and retreat. How long will it take the international media to recognize and acknowledge what Jerusalem Post’s editor David Horovitz has written:

Some may seek comfort in the belief that an ascent to government could prompt a greater sense of responsibility, a move to moderation. But Hamas's intolerance is based on a perceived religious imperative. No believing Muslim, in the Hamas conception, can be reconciled to Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. To deny that, for Hamas, is blasphemy. And that is the ideology to which the Palestinian people, for whatever reason and by their own free hand, have just tied their fate. That is the guiding ideology with which Israel and the West will now have to grapple.

When Sharon announced that Israel was pulling out of Gaza, I thought that was a brilliant move designed to take away the "occupation" excuse, reduce the skyrocketing anti-Israel sentiment and ultimately make Israel safer for the unavoidable war that the Islamists were plotting. It's too bad the old man isn't able to see the fruit of his labors. And kudos to George W. Bush.