THE MIDDLE EAST'S DANCE OF DEATH

The Middle East's Dance of Death - Melanie Phillips
What the world finds so hard to acknowledge is that the source of this terrible conflict is not Israel's behavior. It is not the settlements, the roadblocks, the prisoners. It is not, despite the near-universal assumption, the absence of a Palestinian state. The source is the Arab world-backed Palestinian terror war against Israel's existence. The onus is on Abbas to end that war by dismantling the entire infrastructure of Palestinian terror, and to give his own community an identity other than the impulse to destroy another people. But the signs are not auspicious.

What looks rather more likely is that Abbas is instead a world-class tactician, who will be able to pose with ostensibly clean hands disclaiming the murderous terrorism that Hamas will continue to inflict upon Israel, thus forcing Israel to react and casting it even more decisively as the regional bully. If this is so, then Israel is in even more danger now than it was in before. (www.melaniephillips.com)