Melanie Phillips Also Has Something To Say About The Two State Sollution

While I don't agree that a Hamas controlled Gaza is Israel's worst nightmare, this is an excellent article and worth reading all the way through.

The two-state solution
Melanie Phillips’s Diary

As the Israel boycott sputters on in Britain, with 250 academics denouncing the UCU’s action in an ad in today’s Times and with the House of Lords expressing its concern about the rise in Jew-hatred on campus of which the boycott call is but the latest example, the Palestinians aren’t giving the UCU’s stand against Israel’s ‘occupation’ quite the endorsement it might have expected. Ha’aretz reports:

On Tuesday, a Palestinian journalist likened the Palestinian Authority to a smoke-belching car wreck, adding that it was time to toss the keys to the Israelis. His view is shared by many Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who in recent days have told the media that they are fed up. ‘We’ve had enough, we should be so lucky as to see the return of the Israeli occupation.’

Yes, there are Palestinians in Gaza who actually want the Israelis back in occupation. This is why.

At least 15 Palestinians, including a United Nations relief worker, were killed today as Hamas looked set to complete its conquest of the entire Gaza Strip.

Health officials said another 14 protesters were wounded by bullets and brought to the hospital in civilian cars because ambulances couldn’t navigate the heavy fire….

Muhammad Swairki, 28, a cook for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard, was thrown to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City on Sunday…

Muhammad al-Ra’fati, a Hamas supporter and mosque preacher, was thrown from a Gaza City high-rise apartment building…

Fatah gunmen began firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City…

At a hospital in Beit Hanun, three family members with ties to Fatah were killed, and others wounded. Hospital officials reported that the three were being treated for injuries sustained earlier. One was reportedly shot at close range…

Hamas gunmen attacked the home of a Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, killing his 14-year-old son and three women inside, security officials said. Other Fatah gunmen stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it down…

Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home in the northern Gaza Strip Tuesday evening dressed as a woman to avoid dozens of Hamas militiamen who had attacked it. When he arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles. ‘They literally blew his head off with more than 40 bullets,’ said a doctor at Kamal Udwan Hospital.

‘The situation in the Gaza Strip, and especially in the city of Gaza, is scary. Murders are committed by the dozen, using every [conceivable] weapon… The murder machine, fueled by every conceivable type of hatred, is hurtling in every direction, all the time, everywhere… in the mosques… in the schools… [There are] executions… Leaders are attacked, and their families humiliated… Children and innocent civilians are being murdered…’ Talal Okal, columnist for the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Ayyam, May 17, 2007. READ THE REST...

Even Human Rights Watch has now been forced to condemn the Palestinians:
The Human Rights Watch organization Wednesday condemned Hamas and Fatah for committing ‘serious violations of international humanitarian law, in some cases amounting to war crimes’ in violence in Gaza in recent days. It also took the Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades to task for a June 9 incident in which gunmen used a jeep bearing ‘TV’ insignias to allow them to approach and attack an IDF post in southern Israel, calling it a ‘serious violation of the laws of war.’ In internal Palestinian fighting over the last three days, both Fatah and Hamas military forces have summarily executed captives, killed people not involved in hostilities, and engaged in gun battles with one another inside and near Palestinian hospitals,’ the organization said in a statement.

War crimes, eh? Throwing civilians off the top of buildings? Attacking the wounded in hospitals? Using press insignia as camouflage for attacks, thus putting all journalists at risk? Dozens and dozens of civilians murdered, including children?

So where’s the call for a boycott of the Palestinians?

To those for whom Israel is the cosmic villain of our times — even though it has never behaved in such a barbaric fashion — the implications of these terrible events in Gaza are simply unprocessable. Their extreme discomfiture is evident in their silence. If Israel kills Palestinians in its attempt to defend its civilians from being blown up in pizza parlours or pulverised by rocket attack, the media descends into an instant frenzy of (unjust and distorted) condemnation. But presented with this orgy of Palestinian violence in Gaza, there is little more than an embarrassed shuffling of feet. The Independent ventures bravely into these treacherous waters by blaming everyone other than the Palestinians for reducing them to economic desperation — this despite the fact that since sanctions were imposed on Hamas, the amount of funding going intro Gaza has actually doubled, if not trebled. What it is to be a newspaper of moral principle, eh?

The fact is that what is happening in Gaza is the savage retort to all those who believe that a Palestinian state is the answer. When handed the reins of self-government, this is how the Palestinians behave. Hundreds of rockets fired upon Israel, and their own people thrown off the top of tall buildings and murdered in hospital. As of today, a Palestinian state is simply impossible. Gaza and the West Bank have become two different political entities. As the Jerusalem Post reports:

‘The two-state solution has finally worked,’ a Palestinian journalist in the Gaza Strip commented sarcastically. ‘Today, all our enemies have good reason to celebrate.’

In fact, Israel is certainly not celebrating. Anarchy on its doorstep in Gaza is a nightmare, not least because such chaos spells al Qaeda; indeed, there are good reasons for thinking that al Qaeda are in Gaza already, as this article for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs makes clear. Such chaos presents Israel with yet another fearsome dilemma. With Hezbollah rearming in Lebanon, Syria making preparations for war and Iran racing to develop nuclear weapons, the last thing Israel needs is to reoccupy Gaza. But it may feel it has no alternative, given the already strong public pressure to Do Something to stop the rocket attacks from Gaza onto Sderot, and their likely escalation to Ashkelon and maybe other Israeli cities. Yet occupation is a trap that Israel must do everything in its power to avoid, not least because it would unite Gaza behind Hamas and against Israel — doubtless the very reason for the rocket attacks in the first place.

Moreover, having Hamastan and al Qaeda on their doorstep presents such a threat to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that this could be a moment for a remarkable strategic rebalancing throughout the Middle East. Israel’s fight is suddenly not merely the west’s own fight but that of swathes of the Arab world itself. In the past, Israel has done the dirty work of an international community which has been happy to stand back as it does so — including certain Arab states which have quietly rejoiced as it has gone in against the Palestinians, only to take advantage of the breathing space it thus provided for them by promptly resuming their century-old war of attrition against Jewish peoplehood. Israel should no longer furnish the political kindling for its own sacrifice in this way. The Arab states themselves must finally be forced to deal with the monster they have created.

As ever, Israel is today between yet another murderous rock and a genocidal hard place. And as ever, the international community which has put it there by refusing to acknowledge the real nature of this terrible conflict — and that includes Israel’s so-called friends in America and Britain — continues to make Israel’s position more, not less difficult. From Europe to Washington, siren voices call for ‘engagement’ with Hamas on the grounds that this will bring the wild men in from the cold.

Since Hamas is committed to the genocide of the Jews, it is puzzling to know precisely what there is to engage about. Look, whisper these European and American useful idiots, there are people in Hamas talking about a ten-year ceasefire! They’re even talking about removing their endorsement of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from their Charter!! Such ignorance and naivety make one want to weep. The most likely outcome of such noises-off is that Hamas will very reasonably conclude that the more rockets they fire at Israel and the more Palestinians they throw off the top of tall buildings, the more the Europeans — whose response to brute power is invariably to prostrate themselves before it —will seize any excuse to convince themselves that, yes, these are people with whom we can do business.

Even more astoundingly, America and Israel have inadvertently — but all too predictably — helped arm the very people they are now fighting. With Israel acting as the middle-man, America has been sending weapons to Fatah to equip it in its war with Hamas. Leaving aside the small matter that Fatah, too, remains committed to the destruction of Israel and that its own terrorist affiliates have persistently attacked Israeli targets, we can now see from the Jerusalem Post the truly imbecilic consequence:

A PA official expressed deep concern over Hamas’s success in taking control of several Palestinian security installations. He revealed that Hamas had succeeded in laying its hands on large amounts of weapons belonging to the Fatah-controlled security forces in many parts of the Gaza Strip. ‘They have seized thousands of rifles, large amounts of ammunition and dozens of vehicles, including armored jeeps,’ he said. ‘This is really bad news for all.’

And meanwhile the elephant in the room remains Iran, which is funding and arming Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Syria, not to mention waging war against the west by proxy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Israel remains caught in a lethal trap, because it is trying to solve a problem that it cannot solve since it did not create it. The real architects of this impasse are the countries of the free world, which have failed utterly to grasp that the Israel/Palestine conflict is but one theatre of a global struggle; not a conflict over the division of a piece of land but rather one front in a global onslaught against the west. While trying vainly to solve Israel /Palestine in hope this will calm everything else down, the free world fails to grasp that it is only by dealing with regional and global aggression that Israel/Palestine will ever be resolved. Backing the Big Lie of the justice of Palestinian statehood, which has meant in fact that a country that was victorious at its rebirth against forces that tried to wipe it out has uniquely been expected ever since to make reparations to its attackers who continue to try to destroy it and to provide them with a state from which they can finish the job, has been the biggest single incentive to terror and war in the Middle East. Only when this is acknowledged, and the free world locates the moral compass which has been absent from its dealings for decades, will there be any prospect of justice in the Middle East and peace for the world.