Oh to be a Palestinian in the Happy Land of the Free

Palestinian internal violence, gangs, tribal feuds, honor killings, is commonplace but tends to go unreported and unheard in the West. The killing of three boys by Hamas gunmen as part of an attempt to assassinate their father, who is a Fatah intelligence officer, is a glaring exception because Fatah still controls the bulk of the media access. That disparity alone should be a demonstration to what extent the press reporting from Gaza and the West Bank are captive to the demands of their terrorist hosts.

Bush and many politicians and pundits boasted of the democratic elections in 'Palestine' treating it as a meaningful sign of civic and political progress. Of course this sort of cluelessness is typical and as Hamas and Fatah have been busy demonstrating since then, just because an election is Democratic doesn't mean that the resulting government or its opposition will be. Africa and Latin America provide ample examples of that. A democratic election is merely a means for a faction to get to power. What they do once in power is defined by their principles and morals, by the way they do things every day, not just on election day.

Hamas and Fatah are terrorist organizations. When the elections were done, they began playing brinkmanship games hovering on the verge of civil war but with neither side quite ready to step over the line yet. Knowing only how to be terrorists, Fatah and Hamas 'activists' went around shooting at each other and trying to assassinate each other's top officials, seize control of the security forces and win the propaganda war at home. The Palestinian Arab inability to compromise with Israel is not merely limited to Israel, but it is equally an inability to compromise with their own.

The irony of course is that Israel's own targeted assassinations for the most part went after 'ticking time bomb' terrorists who were on the verge of carrying out attacks. The Hamas government has no such restraint. Israeli troops used tear gas and rubber bullets against stone throwing protesters, forbidden to open fire unless their lives were in danger. Hamas security forces by contrast responded to the usual Palestinian stone throwing protest after the killing of the three boys by opening fire into the crowd. Fatah leaders predictably claimed it was only a few children throwing rocks.

All told Israel was a good deal more restrained and respectful of civil rights, than the democratically elected Hamas government, Jimmy Carter praises so highly. Unsurprisingly when terrorists get into power, they rarely care very much for restraint or civil rights and the tactics they use to govern, are the tactics of terrorists, kill, kill and kill.

Unable to change or grow, Hamas and Fatah are simply rerunning their days fighting Israel, casting the other in the 'Israel' role, thus proving once again that if Israel didn't exist, the arabs would have had to invent it. They can't do anything else like build an actual country and make it work. They can however keep killing each other over land that they've managed to make worthless in a short amount of time and over a population whose wealthiest and brightest are leaving as fast as they can with a remaining citizenry that just can't get away anywhere else.

There was never any country called Palestine. There was never any Palestinian people. Nor was there ever meant to be one by the Arab powers, until they lost a war and the myth of a Palestinian nationality was born. The bearers of that nationality were terrorists and their objective of a state was not based on any dream of building a nation, but of destroying Israel. They can't function as a civic body because they aren't one. If you turn over Los Angeles to the Crips and Bloods, they won't begin running city services. They'll begin fighting amongst themselves and use whatever authority they're given to shake down and demand protection money. That's been the history of the Palestinian state until now.

While Western politicians, activists and aid workers continue to try and maintain the fiction of a Palestinian state, inside are two gangs in uniforms tearing away at each other and occasionally Israel, while Israel and the West maintains what they have left in the way of infrastructure. Palestine thus becomes the new Iraq or the old Iraq as the case may be. When the first suicide bombing takes place in a mosque, the media will finally figure it out too.

Lacking the social and political tools for compromise and with a local branch of Al Queda operating there, the hellhole referred to as Palestine has all the elements needed to turn into a proper zone, exactly the direction it's going in. But if Al Queda's strategy in Iraq successfully destroyed America's hopes for building democracy there and is getting American soldiers out, in Gaza it's doing nothing beyond melting down any possible functioning Palestinian state and thus keeping Israel exactly where it is.