Endangering Israelis For Condi's Sake!

As of Wednesday Israeli civilians were sitting ducks again. Rockets landed near Sderot and near Ashkelon and the Israeli army did not respond. Although the civilians’ luck held out and the rockets only hit open fields, they may have been intended as a show of force and a warning to Israel not to contemplate any further moves.

Condi Rice was in town, and it was time to turn the other cheek. Impressions over the weekend that Israel was finally launching a big operation in Gaza dispelled quickly by Monday morning; Rice was on her way and the Bush administration had signaled its displeasure over Israel’s brief war on terror. Israeli forces were withdrawn in about as much time as it had taken Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to state on Sunday that “Israel has no intention to stop fighting even for one moment.”

It was “peace” time again. The object of Rice’s supplication, Mahmoud Abbas, had said Israel’s strikes in Gaza, which he called “worse than the Holocaust,” made further talks impossible. This clearly caused Rice much more concern than the rockets on the Israeli towns. She has never seen the rockets as an untenable situation; a suspension of talks with Abbas is something else again.

As always, it didn’t matter what the anointed Abbas had done, not done, or said. That a few weeks earlier he had proclaimed three days of mourning for the arch-terrorist George Habash. That he had not reformed a single PA institution, disarmed a single militia, or legitimized Israel in the mind of a single genocidally brainwashed Palestinian child.

Or that he had boastingly told a Jordanian paper just last Thursday that his PLO was the incubator of worldwide terrorism including Hezbollah, that it was he who had “fired the first bullet of the resistance” back in 1965, that he aspired to form another unity government with Hamas, that he would resume “armed conflict” with Israel when the time was right, and that at Annapolis “they wanted us to say we recognize Israel as a Jewish state in the closing statements, but we wouldn't hear of it.”

All that didn’t count, just as for people of Rice’s mindset the actions, inactions, and words of Abbas’s boss and mentor Yasser Arafat had never counted until—and in some cases not even then—the Israeli streets were flowing with blood and strewn with body parts. Yes, Rice, coming to Israel this time, perceived an emergency: not that Hamas was now regularly bombarding not only little, “expendable” Sderot but also larger Ashkelon with its port, hospital, and power plants—but that the talks with Abbas had stopped.

That was why, by Wednesday, things were back to normal: Israeli civilians were left defenseless while American and Israeli leaders were making inane statements. At the start of the day Abbas was still saying he wouldn’t return to the talks; by later in the day Rice, mission finally accomplished, claimed she had gotten him back on the peace wagon.

So she was able to proclaim: “Hamas, which in effect holds the people of Gaza hostage in their hands is now trying to make the path to a Palestinian state hostage to them. We cannot permit that to happen.”

Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, hardly less enthused, also said Hamas should not dictate the pace of the peace talks, and noted proudly that Israel had kept them going even after February’s suicide bombing in Dimona and last week’s killing of an Israeli by a Hamas rocket. “Peace negotiations,” she intoned, “are not a gift that somebody gives the other. It’s a mutual interest, a mutual aspiration and a mutual dream of our two peoples.”

So there you have it, the wisdom of the top two diplomats of, respectively, the United States and Israel, the last two Western democracies still willing—at least in part—to commit large forces to fight the jihad: the Palestinians are the same as the Israelis, just as peace-loving and worthy of independence, except for a slight hindrance called Hamas.

It would matter less if this drivel was just rhetoric. But the dire nature of the words is matched by the dire nature of policy as the two governments have let once-tough Israel turn into a Middle Eastern laughingstock that allows Hamas to bombard its people with impunity while it chases phantoms of peace with the same Fatah movement in whose long terrorist pedigree Abbas takes such pride.

There were also reports on Wednesday that Israel’s security cabinet had instructed the army to present a plan to put a total end to the rocket attacks, or had formulated such a plan itself. Although by now it is hard to believe that Israel, with the U.S. watching over its shoulder, is capable of any sort of sustained action, it also—still—remains hard to believe that Israel will just keep letting the Hamas terror-state subject its citizens to ever-escalating terror.