The unreal look at Palestinian "peace"

Caroline Glick:

The domestic and international debate about the Palestinians has become thoroughly detached from reality. On the one hand there are the friendlies. These include the Olmert government, the Israeli media, the Bush administration and some European governments. The friendlies say that the "moderate" Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah terror organization commander Mahmoud Abbas is the key to peace. Everything must be done they say, to strengthen Abbas against the Hamas terror organization, which they oppose.

But if this week's bloody battles between Fatah and Hamas terrorists in Gaza showed anything, they showed that Abbas is anything but weak. When he wishes to confront Hamas, he is more than capable of doing so. The reason that peace has eluded us is not because Abbas is weak but because he doesn't want peace with Israel. He will battle Hamas to enhance his power but not to secure chances of peace with Israel. Far from the key to ending the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Abbas is part of the problem.

Pitted against the friendlies, are the unfriendlies. These include people like EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, UN officials, the European press and Ha'aretz columnists. Although members of this group adore Abbas, they object to the friendlies' refusal to accept Hamas's rise to power in the PA.

The unfriendlies call for Israel to negotiate with Hamas on the basis of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's offer for a cease-fire with Israel in exchange for an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines. If Israel refuses to accept Hamas's offer, this camp warns, it is liable to find itself facing Al-Qaida rather than Hamas in the future, and that, they claim, would be much worse.

As Johann Hari, from Britain's Independent put it this week, "Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still."

Hari, who went on to advocate that Israel recognize Hamas and give it Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, wrote these lines after he visited with Al-Qaida terrorists in Gaza and described how these jihadists are terrorizing Gazans into accepting Taliban-like repression of women and modernity.

Both the friendlies and the unfriendlies share a fundamental assumption and acceptance of Palestinian jihadism. They assume that Palestinian society will never be anything but a jihadist society and that the only change it will undergo will be one of further radicalization. By limiting their argument to whether Israel should either give its land to Fatah or Hamas, they accept as legitimate the view that for the Palestinians all roads lead inevitably to Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For both groups, the goal of diplomacy is to arrest, not reverse this trend. And both believe Israel should be willing to pay whatever is necessary to appease those who hate it less, or face those who hate it more.

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ISRAEL, OF course, has options other than surrendering to either Hamas or Fatah. It could defeat them. A policy aimed at victory would be based first of all on a recognition that today there is no power structure in the PA, including the PA militias, that is not a terrorist organization. It would similarly recognize that there is no such thing as a good terrorist organization. Consequently, a strategy for winning would recognize that Israel must launch a concerted campaign aimed at defeating and dismantling the PA as a whole.

A policy for victory would also start from a recognition that the common thread joining all the Palestinian terror factions together is jihad. In light of the ideological nature of their common war against Israel, a campaign based on military might alone cannot bring about any long-term sociological or political change in Palestinian society. Unless the ideology of jihad is defeated, a new crop of jihadists will rise up to replace the current one.

Since jihadist ideology is what makes the Palestinian war against the Jews intractable and vests it with its central importance to the global jihad, the defeat of this ideology in the marketplace of ideas will go a long way towards defeating the global jihad as a whole. And the ideology of jihad is far from indestructible.

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There is much more. Defeating the jihad philosophy is critical not only to Israel, but to the rest of the world. As the jihadis flock to die in Somalia, it is important that they be destroyed after they get there. The same is true in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Until the jihadi vision is destroyed the Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel in any "peace" negotiations. They offer not peace, but a pause while they regroup. The PA either cannot or will not stop the attacks by the "independent" groups against Israel. Even now, during the latest cease fire, it is one sided because the rockets still hi Israel. That is the Palestinian version of a cease fire.