The Only Way Forward

Via RCP, David Warren:

No one has made much of an argument for the Palestinians lately, but if someone should try, point at Jericho. The Israel Defence Forces were put this week to the trouble of surrounding a prison there, and extracting its inmates, after the Palestinian Authority announced it would release them. The prison housed men wanted for the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001. The PA had signed the most watertight international agreement to keep those men in jail, but it meant nothing to them. No international agreement they have signed has ever been kept. How do you negotiate with that?

......There is already a shriek for humanitarian assistance, which is what the West provides. But as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, such aid will be diverted from the intended recipients, and used to free up other revenue for weapons.....

Here is where the West must have the stomach to refuse aid, in the full knowledge that it will have humanitarian consequences. For every shekel of aid prolongs the agony, and postpones the day of reckoning for Fatah and Hamas. At some point, the Arabs must learn that there are horrible consequences to horrible acts, that archangels and djinns are not going to save them. They must learn that the only way forward, out of violence and ruin, is to rid themselves of the fanatics who prey upon their vitals. For if you don't want to be held hostage, you must find a way to eliminate your keeper.