Arafat's Legacy

Mahmoud Abbas, the clear frontrunner to lead the Palestinians, is demonstrating once again why the Palestinians can't be trusted as potential partners in peace, calling Israel the 'Zionist enemy.' Their barbaric and savage approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long since convinced me that its foolish for anyone to hope for a peaceful outcome to this quagmire so long as the Palestinians--the leaders and the masses--have such a penchant for genocide and make no efforts to exercise diplomacy in their language. Why the world continues time after time to blast Israel while giving the Palestinians the benefit of the doubt is beyond me. The Palestinians have made it clear that the only solution on their part to the conflict is the destruction of the Israeli state and the annihilation of Jews as a people. Their insistence on the right of return (which is their reason for collapsing the 2000 Camp David meetings) is grounded not so much in historical grievances as it is in the Palestinian desire to demographically overwhelm the land of Israel so that eventually the Jewish state can no longer exist as a sovereign entitity capable of protecting its Jewish population.

I hardly ever find myself agreeing with Alan Dershowitz. But in his book The Case for Israel, he is right on the mark. He provides the reader with non-emotional and factually persuasive arguments for Israel on nearly every imaginable issue stemming out of this conflict. This book should be required reading for anyone who has an interest in fully understanding the most volitile and intractable problem in the world.