Reaffirming the Right of Israel to Exist

Reaffirming the Right of Israel to Exist in the Face of Hamas Attacks in Gaza or the only thing Hamas likes better than dead Israelis is dead Palestinians. By Mortimer Zuckerman at U.S. News and World Report

What the world cannot remember the Israelis cannot forget. The Israelis know the Jewish nation has been one defeat away from extinction for 70 years. They know that every partition plan in the region, from the dawn of Zionism to the present day, has failed because of the Arab failure to accept the State of Israel. They know that the Palestinian leadership is virtually hopeless, wherein the people who are moderate are not effective and the people who are effective are not moderate.

Today the impossible Yasser Arafat has been replaced by the impotent Mahmoud Abbas. It was Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, who presided over the division of the Palestinians into Fatah and Hamas. Hamas doesn’t want peace, and Fatah can’t deliver it. Fatah is so weak that it cannot enforce the rule of law against terrorism or make compromises for fear of the radical Islamists. Indeed, without the support of the Israeli Defense Forces, even now it is under threat of being displaced by Hamas. Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a major Hamas leader, underlined Fatah’s weakness when he said, “Fatah can’t stop us from seizing control of those [West Bank] territories. It is only a matter of time.”

Much more at U.S. News and World Report.