US Sec-State Condi Rice came to Israel with more on her mind than Palestinian missiles being aimed DISCRIMINATELY at Israeli civilians, she had the elusive “peace train” to catch.
Yes, it’s time to hold “peace talks” while one enemy of the Jewish state (Hamas) is trying to kill its citizens, and the other (Fattah) thumps its chest with pride for having taught fellow Arabs the art of terrorism.
Condi Rice was in town, and it was time to turn the other cheek. Impressions over the weekend that Israel was finally launching a big operation in Gaza dispelled quickly by Monday morning; Rice was on her way and the Bush administration had signaled its displeasure over Israel’s brief war on terror. Israeli forces were withdrawn in about as much time as it had taken Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to state on Sunday that “Israel has no intention to stop fighting even for one moment.”
It was “peace” time again. The object of Rice’s supplication, Mahmoud Abbas, had said Israel’s strikes in Gaza, which he called “worse than the Holocaust,” made further talks impossible. This clearly caused Rice much more concern than the rockets on the Israeli towns. She has never seen the rockets as an untenable situation; a suspension of talks with Abbas is something else again.
As always, it didn’t matter what the anointed Abbas had done, not done, or said. That a few weeks earlier he had proclaimed three days of mourning for the arch-terrorist George Habash. That he had not reformed a single PA institution, disarmed a single militia, or legitimized Israel in the mind of a single genocidally brainwashed Palestinian child.
Or that he had boastingly told a Jordanian paper just last Thursday that his PLO was the incubator of worldwide terrorism including Hezbollah, that it was he who had “fired the first bullet of the resistance” back in 1965, that he aspired to form another unity government with Hamas, that he would resume “armed conflict” with Israel when the time was right, and that at Annapolis “they wanted us to say we recognize Israel as a Jewish state in the closing statements, but we wouldn’t hear of it.”
All that didn’t count, just as for people of Rice’s mindset the actions, inactions, and words of Abbas’s boss and mentor Yasser Arafat had never counted until—and in some cases not even then—the Israeli streets were flowing with blood and strewn with body parts. Yes, Rice, coming to Israel this time, perceived an emergency: not that Hamas was now regularly bombarding not only little, “expendable” Sderot but also larger Ashkelon with its port, hospital, and power plants—but that the talks with Abbas had stopped.
And yes, the world does in fact remain silent, concerning Palestinian terrorism that is, it’s only Israeli self defense measures that elicits a response of condemnation. The US seems to be more than willing to give the terrorists a free pass, in order to get everyone on that peace train, though it left the station ages ago, and won’t be back any time soon. *L* KGS
