A Two-State Disaster

By Youssef Ibrahim

A new Palestinian state, carved out of Gaza and the West Bank and governed by Palestinian Arab jihadists, would be a recipe for disaster. Indeed, drawing up a two-state solution now would be tantamount to opening the gates to barbarians.

A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, was on target when he warned that a hastened pullout would unleash a wave of Islamic fundamentalist terror on Israel as well as Arab lands, without resolving anything for Palestinian Arabs.

The notion that unilateral withdrawal by Israel from parts of the West Bank would lead to peace and Palestinian statehood constitutes “flawed logic,” Mr. Woolsey wrote in the May 23 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Spot on. Palestinian Arabs are far from ready to run anything - let alone a country in the tinderbox that is the Middle East.

A few days ago, Egypt asserted that the perpetrators of the most recent deadly bombings of tourist resorts in the Red Sea, as well as those of two other attacks since 2004 that killed more than 100 and wounded hundreds more, were trained, equipped, and “weaponized” ideologically as well as
physically by Moslem Palestinian jihadists in Gaza and the West Bank.

The last thing anyone wants to do is give such folks a green light to widen the scope of their operations.

“The approach Israel is preparing to take in the West Bank was tried in Gaza and has failed utterly. The Israeli withdrawal of last year has produced the worst set of results imaginable: a heavy presence by Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and even some Iranian Revolutionary Guard units; street-fighting between Hamas and Fatah and now Hamas assassination attempts against Fatah’s intelligence chief and Jordan’s ambassador; rocket and mortar attacks against nearby towns inside Israel, and a perceived vindication for Hamas, which took credit for the withdrawal,” Mr.Woolsey wrote.

That is only the tip of the iceberg. There are more reasons to be wary of a Palestinian Arab state.
A new Palestinian Arab state, governed by Palestinian jihadists, would fling open doors to a potpourri of anarchists, assassins, and killers. It is tantamount to laying down a welcome mat for Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah pro-Iranian activists, Saudi Wahhabi preachers of darkness, Iraqi messengers of insurgency, and Moslem Sunni and Shiite fanatics, along with Moslem Brotherhood angels-of-death types, including European and Pakistani Moslems - all competing for hearts and minds in a seriously dysfunctional Palestinian and broader Arab society.

Nation-building is too serious a business to come to that. No responsible party can give such people an area of operation under the name of Palestine. Jihad is already an ideology to a lot of Muslims, indeed an obsession. There is no need to add more bats to a dark night. We already have the government of Saudi Arabia doing enough harm as it is. Should anyone allow this, Israel will be the last to suffer from it. With superb intelligence management, technology, and informant apparatus, it will take care of itself. The question should instead be about the Arabs who live in places like Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and beyond.

Most of them are governed by failed regimes, teetering on the brink of collapse with jihadists nipping at their heels and corruption eating their entrails. Giving Moslem fundamentalists a base in Palestine from which to operate and finish off these dying regimes would be unconscionable.

A two state Palestinian-Israeli solution may be possible one day. But not today. The Palestinian Arabs, who just elected a radical, mindless, bloody Islamic fundamentalist regime, Hamas, as their first freely elected government, have not demonstrated they deserve further indulgence.

They can wait until they learn the price of responsible governance. Democracy is a precious commodity. It has to be consumed by the right people at the right time.

CZOA: A two state solution is synonymous with Hitler's "Final Solution" both of them spell disaster for the Jewish people! Wake up Israel before it is too late!

Sunday, July 23, 2006 01:44 PM