From David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post:
Here we are, after the first intifada and the failure of Camp David, and the second intifada and the detonation of unilateralism, patently short of wisdom and understanding, and stubbornly deaf to warnings both internal and external. Here we are, defiantly none the wiser, with one government minister expressing gentle, thoroughly unsupported optimism about a possible shift in the Palestinian mindset, and her colleague, a man with prime ministerial aspirations at that, just plain wishing Gaza away.
The sadly proven fact that should have long since been internalized is that Mahmoud Abbas has neither fought the terrorism that has blighted our day-to-day life here, nor even been moved to stave off his own political demise by reforming the governance his rotten Fatah apparatus offers his disillusioned people. His Prime Minister Salaam Fayad, the new great white Palestinian hope of the world diplomatic community, meanwhile, is paying the salaries of the very Hamas politicians who seek his humiliation and ouster, and even funding some of Hamas's murderous gunmen, albeit apparently because of some nefarious machinations in the PA's computer room.
Rewarding all this failure with an attempt at substantive diplomacy smacks of desperation - by the Bush administration, by the Quartet, and by Israel's government. It smacks of wishful thinking, of the pursuit of false ideas. And it won't work, because it can't work.
The whole editorial is chock full of quiet, common sense. It's a rare and refreshing read. And it ought to be force fed to Olmert, Bush and the entire Israeli Knesset, along with those Brutish MPs (sic) and a host of other people who, for some reason, just don't get it.
