BOTH sides have to be willing to make peace

From The Washington Post:

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Where to begin.

First of all the WaPo is correct in noting that the Bush policy toward the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has failed. The fact is that it never had a chance to succeed. Remember after 9/11 how the news showed pictures of Palestinians dancing in the streets in pure glee over the deaths of 3000 Americans (this was not something the Palestinian government ginned up - they moved to suppress these demonstrations as quickly as possible so that the West would not know the depth of Palestinian hatred). Remember how they were holding up pictures of Osama bin Laden? Remember how in the First Gulf War the Palestinians were the only Arab people to support Saddam Hussein?

There is no "moderate" force in Palestinian politics. There are only terrorists more willing to lie and play a long game in their war of extermination against Israel than others are. There are Palestinians who wish to live in peace with Israel, but when they do anything to call attention to themselves other Palestinians drag them out of their homes and murder them in the street as a warning to others.

But while the Post's article is correct in calling the current situation in Gaza a failure for the Bush administration it lies by omission in failing to mention that the pursuit of a "two state solution" by working with "moderates" has been US policy since the Clinton administration.

Every attempt to bring peace to the Arab/Israel conflict will end in failure as long as the Arabs define "peace with Israel" as "that state of affairs which will come about when the body of the last Jew has been kicked into a mass grave".

The Palestinians have been so poisoned by hatred and so brainwashed by their fellow Arabs (and by the Western press and left-wing politicians) that they are incapable of forming the mental desire for a true peace based on mutual respect and good will.

The Palestinians can be reprogrammed to live in genuine peace with Israel, but doing so will be a difficult and incredibly bloody process. Difficult because war is seldom easy and bloody because they are going to have to see themselves on the brink of extinction before they will both understand that they must change and be willing to make that change.

We, or the Israelis or both of us together, are going to have to kill so many of them that they surrender inside themselves. We are going to have to break their will and crush their spirit so totally that they crawl to the Jews and say "tell us what we have to do, what we have to say, what we have to believe for you to stop killing us" and mean it with absolute sincerity.

Then there will be lasting peace.

To do this both the Israeli people and the American people will have to gird themselves up and get about the hard and ugly work of slaughter and I frankly doubt that the Israelis have the will to do that. I know that the Americans do not.

But that is the only thing that will truly work other than a complete Palestinian victory. In which case "peace" will break out after the body of the last Jew has been kicked into a mass grave.