Hamas in Gaza, jumping for joy in Israel

Swedish Meatballs Confidential (which tracks a lot of fascinating articles, by the way, albeit accompanied by an "adult theme") points to an excellent article at the Israel Policy Forum summarizing the decades long push by the hard right in Israel to marginalize peace negotiations and Palestinian moderates while issuing beckoning calls to Islamist extremists. If you read one thing about the Gaza situation as it stands today, read this:

There is, no doubt, a whole lot of celebrating going on today. For those more afraid of negotiations than of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of that violent crew, a collapsing Palestinian Authority with Gaza in absolute chaos and with Mahmoud Abbas weakened almost to irrelevancy is a dream come true.

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abbas’ Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv, will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions is a near-certainty.

Whose fault is it? The Palestinians’, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, puts it in today’s Yediot Ahronoth, “The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding of the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured [the Palestinians] to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands…. Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that ‘Abu Mazen must be strengthened,’ but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street.”

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Read it all. An excellent overview of an long sought result. And now that plan to attack and re-invade Gaza is simmering on the IDF stove top.