Hamas Vs Fatah

The path to Palestinian peace and prosperity is so abundantly clear... Palestinians have land, they have access to the ocean, and they have a natural trading partner through their shared border with the region's most stable, democratic, and prosperous country, Israel. Israel currently has only one objective, which is to make the daily shelling from Gaza stop. The moment it stops, peace will resume, as Israel has no inherent interest in bombing Gaza, nor does it do so in any sort of "retaliation" -- it simply does so in an effort to stop the daily murder attempts based there. Anyone with a more effective suggestion should speak up.

So the Gazan path to peace and wealth is obvious, as it has always been: Gazans need to forget about Israel and work on building their own country. For all the talk of how they are suffering, which they indeed are, it makes no sense that they should continue to devote such effort towards rocket-bombing Israel every day.

Israel's path however is much less clear... Israel can try to forget Gaza, but Hamas, the elected representatives of Gaza, won't leave them alone. Hamas, in keeping with local Arab/Persian tradition, are by and large committed to the elimination of all Jews from any lands where Muslim populations are or ever were present. While all the other Jewish communities such as those of Iraq, Yemen, and Algeria have already been wiped out in recent years, there still remains one last bastion where Jews are able to live (somewhat) peacefully in the Middle East, called Israel. Naturally, Iran and Syria are working hard at eliminating this safe haven by fighting a proxy war using the poor Palestinians as foot soldiers.

As an aside, I've heard the current Palestinian condition compared to the Holocaust, which I find incredible. Populations don't increase from genocides; life expectancies don't go up when there's a genocide. On the contrary, the population of Palestine has exploded exponentially with the advent of modern medical care provided by Israel. Infant mortality has dropped drastically, life expectancy is vastly higher, and the simple number of Palestinians alive has risen many-fold as a direct result of their improved medical care from Israeli succor, combined with their high birth rate.

Anyway, on to the point of this post: what do you do with someone who's hellbent on destroying you, even at the cost of destroying himself in the process? The traditional Middle East way to deal with such dissenters is to just wipe them out wholesale if you can. That's what Syria did to its town called Hama, where an uprising was quickly resolved by gassing the entire village. Ditto for many Iraqi Shi'ite and Kurd towns. But that is not the Israeli way.

So the current strategy is I think brilliant. It's a variation of the old divide and conquer, only in this case it's divide and live in peace. The Hamas takeover of Gaza was strangely a blessing, because now for the first time there are two states, with two alternate paths: the West Bank, and Gaza, each led by very different governmental approaches, which for the first time lets people see first hand the results of violence versus peace. Because now the Gazans can see the West Bank, to see how much better they fare by not engaging in perpetual warfare, and the West Bank can see Gaza as an example of what a miserable path war is.

This is good. Not the war, that is of course horrible. Even though their own elected government, Hamas, is responsible, the resulting deaths in Gaza are still tragic and sad... just like today's needless misery in America is still sad even though we voted for it (twice). The thing is, not everyone voted for it, but we still all suffered the consequences. And of those who did vote for George W. Bush, many simply weren't smart or educated or wise enough to understand the consequences.

I'm sure the same must be true in Palestine, where I would assume at least some percentage of the population simply wants to live their life without shelling Israeli residential neighborhoods every day.

The path I see now for Israel is this: use the relative peace in the West Bank to invest heavily and help it prosper, while Gaza flounders under its militant leadership. Israel has indicated its desire to topple Hamas, and of course that does need to happen over the long run, but I'd advise to let them fall from internal forces rather than take them out forcibly.

Eventually, the Gazans will catch on by example... instead of looking covetously onto Israel, they'll see what their own people in the West Bank have done by not fighting. Peace ensues, and everyone lives happily ever after.