Regarding the drama unfolding in Gaza, there's one thing you must understand, if you understand nothing else: If a Palestinian State waits at the end of the so-called peace process, Israel's actions in Gaza will be meaningless.

Not that killing terrorists isn't intrinsically good.

In the past three years, Hamas fired 6,464 rockets into Israel. It kept up the bombardment throughout the Egyptian-brokered "ceasefire," which unraveled in November. In the 6 days prior to the Israeli air offensive, Hamas fired over 300 rockets and mortar rounds.

The rockets red glare, the sheiks bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our jihad was still there.

True to form, Hamas deliberately targets civilian areas. Whether it kills a 6-year- old Jewish child in its bed or an Israeli soldier in the field makes no difference to Iran's proxies.

Since 2000, Hamas has been responsible for thousands of terror attacks, killing 425 Israelis and wounding 2,233. From 1993 through 2005, it sent 113 suicide bombers into Israel, to commit indiscriminate slaughter at shopping malls, restaurants, hotels and buses.

Responsibility for these atrocities extends beyond Hamas fighters and their crackpot spiritual leaders to the overwhelming majority of Gazans who support and shelter them.

Regarding the present unpleasantness, Israel's enemies — the U.N., most European states, the Arab League, Islam Inc., Jimmy Carter, etc. — are behaving predictably, muttering imprecations or nattering about the lack of proportionality, suffering inflicted on civilians and need for an immediate ceasefire.

Israel's enemies may be dangerous. Its friends are lethal.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz argues that Israel's response to Hamas conforms to international law — as if anyone outside the faculty of the Harvard Law School actually cares. The self-styled super-Zionist supports a "two-state solution" - - Israel and anti-Israel.

On the right, columnist Charles Krauthammer, informs us that, "The unpardonable strategic error" of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, "was not the withdrawal itself, but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated... ."

And once the territory was surrendered to the terrorists, what "deterrence regime" would be effective — saturation bombing every hour on the hour, weekly incursions? There was a time when I thought Krauthammer knew such things.

Not to be outdone, Israeli President Shimon (Simple Shimon) Peres just can't understand why Hamas is so unreasonable.

On December 30, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the doddering socialist sputtered, "This shooting (Hamas' rocket attacks) has no point, no logic, no chance."

The point is to kill as many Jews as possible, and for the killing to continue until every inch of their mythical Palestine is liberated, from the river to the sea — which is quite logical from Hamas' perspective

Peres is symptomatic of Israel's peace-at-any-price leadership: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Secretary Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni — the Larry, Moe and Curly of Israeli politics.

Then there's Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who, following the lead of the White House, announced, "We strongly condemn the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and hold Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence there."

Last October, speaking before the American Task Force on Palestine, Rice remarked, "I believe that there could be no greater legacy for America than to help bring into being a Palestinian state for a people who have suffered for too long, who have been humiliated for too long, who have not reached their potential for too long, and who have so much to give the international community and all of us." (And Rice is reputed to be a realist.)

The Palestinians have so much to give us — rockets, mortars, suicide bombers, honor killings and anti-Semitic raving to rival the Third Reich. Rice probably expects a Palestinian state to look like a New England town meeting — with hummus and fleas.

Gaza must be put in perspective.

In August 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip. In the process, it destroyed Jewish communities and uprooted more than 8,000 residents. Many had to be hauled away by the Israeli army and police, in perhaps the most discreditable incident in the nation's history.

Given the opportunity to rule their own land, the Palestinians did what comes naturally. They immediately set about torching synagogues, intent on eradicating any evidence of a Jewish presence. They even demolished the Israeli-built greenhouses that could have boosted their meager agriculture.

They also began bringing in all manner of arms through tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt, under the eyes of Egyptian border guards.

In 2006, Hamas won control of the Palestinian Legislative Council, with almost twice as many seats as Fatah. While he retains the title of President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas's party is the junior partner in a Hamas government.

What does Hamas want? It's not, you should pardon the expression, rocket-science. As the group's spiritual leader, the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, explained in 1997, Israel must be made to "disappear from the map."

The Hamas Charter is chillingly clear: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." Furthermore: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

During the present offensive, Husan Abdallah, speaking for the Lebanese Association of Islamic Scholars, concurred. "The truce with the Zionist entity is meaningless. The solution is to renew the resistance in a stronger and more effective way. Let pure bodies blow up again in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, and in all of the cities of occupied Palestine." Muslim scholars have Ph.D.s in flying body parts.

If Hamas is intransigent, what about Fatah?

Fatah as an alternative to Hamas is like the S.S. as an alternative to the Brown Shirts.

Despite his occasional song-and-dance routine for Western audiences, Abbas still refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. The PA emblem, adopted in 2008, shows all of Israel covered by an Arab headdress and labeled "Palestine," flanked with a Kalashnikov rifle.

PA textbooks teach the most virulent Jew hatred as well as purveying revisionist history. (e.g., The Jews never ruled Palestine, even in Biblical times.)

According to various opinion polls taken in 2007 and 2008, 70% to 75% of Palestinians think Israel should not exist — anywhere. A 2008 poll of Palestinians by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, taken in May 2008, showed 84% of the people who've "suffered for too long" approved of a terror attack on a Jerusalem yeshiva that month which left 8 students dead.

Fatah has killed more Israelis than Hamas. (When it comes to terrorism, Hamas is the junior partner.) Altogether, since 1993, almost 2,000 Israelis have been killed, and another 10,000 wounded.

Writing in The Baltimore Jewish Times, on October 20, 2008, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America reports: "Only recently, Abbas lowered Palestinian flags and declared three days of mourning when veteran PLO terrorist George Habash died. When Israel released this year perhaps the most vile of terrorists, Samir Kuntar — a man who had crushed the life out of a small girl with a rock after murdering her father before her eyes — Abbas personally sent congratulations to Kuntar's family and later met him on a visit to Beirut."

Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy rejects "the illusion" that there is "an appreciable difference between Fatah and Hamas."

But Israel's government believes, on blind faith, that such a difference does exist.

In fact, they're staking their national existence on it.

Israel's ruling Kadima party is committed to giving the Palestinian Authority the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and East Jerusalem.

With Gaza as a model, it will expel most of the 275,000 Jews living in these areas. And, of course, it will return the Golan Heights to Syria. Let no tyrant go unappeased. Let no piece of strategic territory go un-surrendered. Washington is in complete accord with this plan for state-icide.

All of this is supposed to happen before final-status negotiations even begin. What's left will include a "right of return," to what's left of Israel, for several million descendants of the Palestinians who fled in 1948. Naturally, the more than 800,000 Jews driven from Arab lands between 1948 and 1967, and their descendants, get nothing.

This will leave the Israelis with completely indefensible borders (its Western border will go from 120 kilometers to up to 735 km), a nation that's barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point, 80% of their population within mortar and rocket range, and the religion of rest-in-peace controlling the high ground (the mountains of Judea and Samaria and the Golan).

In the name of justice, Palestine will become the 23rd Arab Muslim state in the Middle East. Controlling 99.8% of the region's land (10,000 square miles) isn't enough. Dar al-Islam must also have the heart of Israel presented to it on a platter. The rest of the body will soon follow.

I heard a talking-head babbling about why the Middle East's problems are so intractable. The answer is a five-letter word — Islam.

From the Muslim perspective, the existence of Israel is blasphemous. Any territory once controlled by Islam must remain so till the end of the world, when Allah comes, good Muslims get their 72 olive-eyed virgins and the rest of us roast in the fires of hell for all eternity.

The terrorists who murdered 191 people in cold blood, in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, mentioned among their goals reestablishing Muslim rule over "Andalucia" in southern Spain and resurrecting the Spanish Caliphate that ended 516 years ago.

The Koran is the impetus for jihad, Jew-hatred and the drive for world domination.

The following Sura (Koran 3:112) comes before the preamble to the Hamas Covenant. Speaking of the Jews, it proclaims: "Abasement shall be pitched on them, wherever they are come upon, except they be in a bond of God, and a bond of the people (in a society where they are subservient to Muslims); they will be laden with the burden of God's anger, and poverty shall be pitched on them; that, because they disbelieved God's signs, and slew the Prophets without right; that, for that they acted rebelliously and were transgressors."

The Koran also says Allah turned the Jews into apes and pigs, and in the end times, Muslims will slaughter every Jew. The stones will cry out, "O' Muslim, O' servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!"

Because they don't take their own Bible seriously, the Israeli left and Western secularists can't understand why Muslims would take to heart the Koran's anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, Europeans thought Mein Kampf was hyperbole, until it was too late.

If you're curious about what a Palestinian state would look like, consider Mumbai. Among 174 dead were a rabbi and his pregnant wife, who endured unbelievable torture (the wife was also sexually assaulted) before they were killed.

Think of Kosovo, where 90% of the Serb population has been ethnically cleansed and Orthodox monuments were razed after NATO turned the province over to Albanian Muslims. Note what's happening in Europe, which is experiencing the worst anti- Semitic violence since Kristallnacht. (In Paris, in September, three Jewish teens were sent to the hospital by a chain-wielding gang of Arabs.)

Consider the homicidal Holocaust-deniers in Tehran (Hamas' sugar daddies) who are hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, the 800,000 Jews driven from Arab lands, Haj Amin Husseini — the late Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent World War II in Berlin and recruited 20,000 Muslims for the S.S. (who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary), and the fact that Bethlehem, once predominately Christian, is today over 88% Muslim.

The face of a Palestinian state is a death-head — a grinning skull with rockets coming out of its eye sockets. With such an entity, Israel cannot co-exist. On that at least, Hamas and I can agree.

Don. Feder is a former syndicated columnist for the Boston Herald and author of Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? (Regnery) and A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America. He works as a freelance writer and media consultant and serves as the president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation. Contact Don Feder by email at coldsteel@rcn.com and visit his website www.donfeder.com

This commentary originally appeared January 12, 2009, at www.GrassTopsUSA.com (http://www.grasstopsusa.com).

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