The Redhunter

The Palestinians are a backward people, indoctrinated toward brutality. They don’t rate a sovereign state or anyone’s help until they civilize themselves. Sovereignty is a privilege that implies acceptance of civilized norms — that is why we speak of states like Iran and North Korea as “rogues.” Regardless of whether there really are scattered Palestinian moderates, it is a dangerous fantasy to assume the Palestinian people, as a whole, are ready to be anyone’s peace partner.

We are enabling their hatred when we provide support without insisting that the Palestinian people — not just Abbas and Fatah, but the people — convincingly foreswear revolution, terrorism, violence, ethnic-cleansing, and the goal of eliminating Israel. We are a generation or more, at least, from any hope of such developments. In the meantime, as long as we subsidize the hatred, we shall be buying more of it, while giving the Palestinians no incentive to reform.

Tough words about the Palestinians, but it's hard to see things otherwise. If by some magic every Israeli settlement disppeared and the Palestinians got an internationally recognized state tomorrow with at least part of Jerusalem as it's capital, all they'd do is use it as a base from which to attack Israel. And murder each other.

There isn't going to be any "two state solution", as long as either Fatah or Hamas are in charge. Neither wants to live side by side with Israel. We're only fooling ourselves by trying to play one off of the other.

What Fatah Stands For

Fatah is basically a terrorist organization. Its very name means "conquest", that which is supposed to happen during or after a jihad; the holy war leads to conquest. They don't choose these names by accident or without considering their meaning. Fatah was created by the late terror master himself, Yasser Arafat. It was operatives from Fatah which formed Black September, the group which carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich.

Today the organization is led by Mahmoud Abbas (or "Abu Mazen", or whatever name he goes by these days). If Arafat was a street punk grown up to be the local crime boss, Mazen Abbas is the nutty neighbor down the street. In his 1983 Phd.D dissertation, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, he

...suggested that the figure of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis was a false one, "peddled" by the Jews. To bolster that thesis, he quotes known Holocaust revisionists as authoritative sources. Seeking conspiracy theories that would serve Arab interests, Abu Mazen also wrote that the Zionist movement "led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule... to expand the mass extermination." Zionists, he contends, collaborated with the Nazis to murder Jews, in order to gain sympathy for the creation of the State of Israel.

And this is the guy we're trying to make nice with. This is insane.

Look at Fatah's Constitution. Under "Goals", we have

Article (12) Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.

Article (13) Establishing an independent democratic state with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem is its capital city, and protecting the citizens' legal and equal rights without any racial or religious discrimination.

"Complete liberation" does not mean the West Bank and Gaza. It means that and the whole of Israel too.

Here's the Fatah logo, which you get get straight off of their website at Fateh.net

According to Wikipedia

The Fatah official emblem shows two fists holding rifles and a hand grenade superimposed on a map of historic Palestine (i.e. British Mandate borders, including present-day Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip)

In other words, they want the whole thing.

Elsewhere, on their website, Fatah insists on the "right of return".

The Right of Return is one in which the Palestinians insist that the refugees, and their descendants, allegedly displaced during the 1948 war of independence, have the right to return to Israel proper and claim the land that they say they owned. Depending on which website you believe, this would mean anywhere from 3.5 to 6 million Arabs moving into Israel, a country of 6 million Jews and 1 million Arabs. The clear purpose of the "right of return" is to destroy Israel.

See now why peace with Fatah is impossible?

Until they change their ways we are wasting our time with them. President Clinton was probably smart when he invited Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David in 2000 to try and hammer out an agreement based on the 1993 Oslo Accords (the ones which established the "roadmap for peace". Arafat refused all reasonable offers, and the situation has deteriorated every since. Anything we do for them needs to be conditioned on improving their record on human rights, corruption, and terrorism, as Eric Cantor suggests. To do otherwise is to lend aid to our enemies. You know, the ones the President Bush at one time said we were against.