Well, my earlier prediction was that the erection of an armed Hamas state in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem might result in an awakening of Israelis from their past 15 years of self-delusions. It is certainly not evident yet that this is the case.

Let us catch up on what has happened since the Hamas victory in the Palestinian "elections" was reported last week.

First of all, the media inside and outside Israel continue to reveal their nonfunctioning brains when it comes to the Middle East. They are almost all attributing the Hamas victory to the "failure of the PLO to deliver public services" and to the fact that the Hamas is more efficient and competent in delivering such services. On BBC radio this morning, I heard a commentator attributing the victory to the fact that the Hamas is better at fixing potholes and sewers than the PLO. He was serious.

Second, we are hearing deafening declarations that the Hamas is a group with which Israel and the world can do business, pragmatists, people interested in jobs and budgets, people who may well have a lurid set of rhetoric and slogans and declared platform, but basically people interested mainly in the perqs of office. These media commentators are convinced that, once in office, the Hamas will devote all of its energies to ecology, affirmative action, and fixing potholes.

Third, we are hearing the Israeli Left chiming in unison that the Hamas took power because Israel assassinated terrorist leaders and fought back. Had Israel just turned the other cheek after each bus or café bombing, the PLO could have stayed in office and struck nice new peace deals with Israel based on new unilateral Israeli appeasements and concessions.

Fourth, we are hearing claims that Abu Mazen will remain the real power behind the throne, in charge -- even if the Hamas controls the Palestinian "parliament". I call this the von Hindenburg argument.

Finally, we are hearing cheers from many in the Israeli Far Left that the Hamas is in power because the Hamas is the more "genuine" and "authentic" representative of Palestinian opinion. Israeli leftists are increasingly cheering Hamas because they are opening endorsing the Hamas agenda itself, which just happens to be based upon annihilating Israel.

Let us clear up a few things. First of all, the chance that the Hamas will now devote itself to something other than terror and war for the extermination of Israel and its Jewish population is precisely the same as the chance in 1933 that Hitler, once in power, would abandon his ambitions of conquering his neighbors. If someone were to say in 1933 that Hitler, as Reich Chancellor, will spend his energy on ecological problems, potholes, women's representation, and speeding up mail delivery, that person would have -- or at least should have -- been confined to an asylum. The Nazi raison d'etre, the very essence of their entire existence, was to go to war. The raison d'etre of the Hamas is to escalate terror, attack Israel, seek to draw Muslim armies into the war with Israel, and ultimately annihilate Israel and its Jewish population. The chance that the Hamas will now suddenly abandon its genocidal agenda is exactly the same as the chance of bin Laden embracing Buddhism or Quakerism and running in the Massachusetts Senate race.

The armed Hamas nazi state that Israel's political elite has now succeeded in erecting will immediately begin importing serious weaponry -- not the nickle and dime Kassam rockets being glued together in Gaza basements, but 21st century state-of-the-art weapons, financed by the Saudis or Iranians, shoulder missiles, tanks, and quite possibly weapons of mass destruction, like chemical and biological agents. The idea that the Hamas will abandon terror and war because it will be so busy building roads and hospitals is as patently absurd as would have been a similar expectation from Hitler. And the Hizbollah will likely back the Hamas by opening up a second front against Israel from Lebanon.

When Hitler took power, the nominal President of the Reich in 1933 was Paul von Hindenburg and at first he was expected to "keep Hitler under control." Von Hindenberg was dead by August 1934 and Hitler simply annexed the Presidential powers to his own office. The seizure of power by the Hamas and their implementation of Islamofascist Gleichschaltung will take place much faster.

The Hamas took power and evicted the PLO for one simple reason, having nothing to do with potholes. The Palestinian population has by now been thoroughly nazified and the Hamas embodies the Palestinian goals of genocide and terror better than does the PLO. THAT is the "only reason Hamas won. The PLO had been "compromised" in the eyes of most Palestinians by playing the Peresian game of make-pretend cooperation with Israel, by giving lip service to "peace", by sitting in make-pretend councils of cooperation with Israelis. The average Palestinian wants none of that. He and she want, war, blood, genocide. Just like the average German did in 1939. The media are refusing to look at the swastika staring them in the face in Gaza and Jenin.

The Israeli daily Haaretz, represented best by its anti-Israel leftist fanatic Gideon Levy, is celebrating the victory of Hamas as a great moral victory. Not because it will force Israelis to acknowledge the folly of the last 14 years of appeasement, but because Haaretz columnists simply endorse the goals of the Hamas. See for yourself. Here are some quotes from Gideon Levy's article[1]:

"The good news from the occupied territories is that Hamas won the elections. ... one can find quite a few points of light in the Hamas victory."

"First, these are very authentic results, achieved through elections that were respectably democratic, even though they took place under the least democratic circumstances imaginable, the occupation. As usual, we were threatened by our experts with "anarchy," and, as usual, the Palestinians did not meet those expectations. There was no shooting and no rioting; the Palestinian nation had its say with admirable order. It said "no" to a movement that did not bring it any achievements in the just struggle against the occupation, and it said "yes" to those who appeared to the voters to be braver and with clean hands. ..."

"Second, both Israelis and Palestinians can learn important lessons from the results of the election. The Israelis have to finally learn that applying force will not get the desired results. ..."

"To that end, both sides, Israel and Hamas, must free themselves of the slogans of the past. Those who pose preconditions, like disarming Hamas, will miss the chance. It is impossible to expect that Hamas will disarm, just as it is impossible to expect that Israel would disarm. In Palestinian eyes, Hamas' weapons are meant to fight the occupation, and, as is well-known, the occupation is not over. Practically, and indeed morally, the armed are armed if they are equipped with F-16s or Qassam launchers. If Israel were to commit to an end to killing Hamas operatives, there is reason to assume that Hamas would agree, at least for a while, to lay down its arms. ... If Israel were to be friendly toward Hamas, it could benefit."

No doubt Haaretz is convinced that Hitler would have been willing to agree to arms control and demilitarization in 1939 as well.

Anti-Zionist ultra-leftist Uri Avnery and similar people are already filling the Israeli press with ads calling for "negotiations" with the Hamas, paid for no doubt by the EU and similar deep pockets. It will not be surprising if some far leftist Israeli professors and writers are already seeking audiences with the Hamas leaders for "negotiations", reminiscent of the illegal ones the Left conducted in Oslo with the PLO in the late 1980s. And -- if so -- it will be interesting to see if the Hamas beheads any of them. The Hamas dons, for their part, are being candid about the raison d'etre of their new state -- building an army to attack Israel[2].

Meanwhile, the immediate issue that has come up on the Israeli domestic agenda is whether to turn 200 million shekels in funds over to the new Hamas government. Israel under the Oslo "agreements" is required to give the Palestinian Authority some receipts from Value Added Taxes and similar sources of revenue. The 200 million shekels is now due. The Likud under Netanyahu is using this as an election issue to embarrass acting Prime Minister Olmert and his "Kadima" party. But let us bear in mind that the Likud -- before the Kadima split -- itself turned billions of dollars in funds over to Palestinian terrorists, mainly from the PLO, so the Likud pot is calling the Olmert kettle black.

Haaretz and the Left are demanding that Olmert hand the arrears over to the Hamas immediately. After all, it is "rightfully theirs!" Another Haaretz columnist demands that the money be given to the Hamas[3]. Olmert is also seriously considering letting the Hamas terror leaders inside Syria and Jordan move to the West Bank or Gaza[4].

The other immediate Israeli domestic issue is whether the Olmert government will go ahead with its plans to conduct a new expulsion of Jews this week, this time from homes in the commercial downtown street of Hebron and from an "illegal" West Bank settlement named Atzmona. Given the Hamas victory and the obvious fait accompli, making all further deals with "Palestine" impossible, will Olmert go ahead with the expulsions, as new appeasements of a Palestinian Authority, now controlled by the open allies of bin Laden? I have a month's salary bet on Olmert going ahead with them! (Here is Olmert's naíve "expectation" of how the world will shun the Hamas[5].

Meanwhile, Amir Peretz, the new bolshevik head of the Israeli Labor Party, has announced that, in light of the Hamas victory and the creation of a nazi Hamas state in the suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, he will not be changing his party's agenda one iota. Raising the minimum wage to increase Israeli unemployment and cutting defense spending to use for social welfare services are still at the top of Labor's agenda.

For years, I have been warning that Israel's politicians were in effect working to place Israel's very right to exist on the international negotiations table. Ever since the 1980s, Israel's leaders gave up insisting publicly that Israel has the moral right to its land, and that the Palestinians are not and never were a "people" (but were simply the local groups of Arabs who were part of the Arab people already controlling territory nearly twice that of the United States). Israeli leaders gave up trying to tell the world or even telling Israelis that Israel has a moral right to exist at least as great as any other country. Instead, the Israeli political elite continually adopted the rhetoric of those seeking Israel's annihilation, speaking about a solution based on "Two States for Two People", speaking about the "legitimate representatives of the Palestinian nation", and so on. Some Israeli leftists went so far as to start calling Israel's very existence a Naqba (Arabic for catastrophe). Israel's own leaders hectored the country, telling Israelis that there was no peace with the Arab world because ISRAELIS were to blame, because ISRAELIS did not desire it enough.

The result of all this is that nearly every political web site on earth today is filled with debate over whether Israel has any right at all to exist, with the overwhelming opinion being that it does not. No one debates whether Jordan, or Canada, or Australia have the right to exist.

Now that Israel and the West have collaborated to empower the Hamas and turn the reins of power in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over to the genocidal maniacs of the Hamas, the unavoidable result is that Israel has in effect agreed to place its own right of existence on the international table, to be debated and reconsidered, this 58 years after Israel was created.

The expectation by Israel's leaders that the world will shun the Hamas and refuse to fund it or talk with it is yet another delusion, one that should last for about a week. Every country on earth will acknowledge not only the dry fact of Hamas rule, but most will cheer the Hamas agenda and the "legitimacy" of Hamas demands. By the spring, Israel will be under international pressure to make much larger gestures of goodwill to the Hamas and to enter negotiations over whether it will continue to exist as a sovereign state.

Footnotes

1.  Gideon Levy, "Only the right can," Haaretz, February 1, 2006
(www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/675837.html).

2.  Meshal: News Agencies, "Hamas ready to merge armed factions to form PA army," Haaretz, January 28, 2006
(www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/675793.html).

3.  Zvi Bar'el, "Give them the money," Haaretz, January 29, 2006
(www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/675853.html).

4.  Herb Keinon, Margot Dudkevitch and AP, "Policy unclear on Mashaal coming to Gaza," Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2006
(www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1137605934660&pagename= JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull).

5.  Aluf Benn, "Mofaz: At this stage Hamas is behaving responsibly," Haaretz, January 29, 2006

(www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/675821.html).

_________________________End of Story___________________________

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