WHY WON'T MEDIA CALL THIS A CIVIL WAR?

Uncivil War (Investor's Business Daily)
The intelligentsia of the developed world have too much invested in portraying the plight of the Palestinians as a problem created by hard hearts in Israel. Civil war? That better describes the quagmire President Bush faces is in Iraq. No such thing in the Palestinian territories. The people there and their beleaguered leaders are just spending too much of their energy trying to survive Jewish cruelty to fight among themselves.

Some Palestinians are indeed expending too much energy trying to survive, but it's not the Israelis who are making their lives miserable. It's the Palestinians' so-called leadership and the factions — the Fatah party and Hamas, which were supposed to be sharing power — that are fighting for control of the region that keep the area stirred up.

Many Palestinians would be happy just to get on with their lives on the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip.

But that won't happen as long as their "leaders" harass Israel and fight each other — and as long as the Arab world wants the Palestinian territories to continue as a strategic location from which it can attack Israel and eventually drive it into the sea.

Rather than fighting themselves, the Palestinians could have been celebrating their 60th anniversary as a nation this year.

In 1947, the United Nations engineered new borders in the region, but the Arab world rejected a partition that would have created separate Jewish and Arab states. The Palestinian leadership has rejected every proposal since, including plans Israel has agreed to.

Evidence that the Palestinian problem is more about Israel and less about the well-being of Palestinians was underscored Wednesday. When roughly 1,000 civilian Palestinians marched through Gaza City chanting "stop the killing," two of the demonstrators were killed and four were wounded after one or both of the factions opened fire on them.

Fatah, party of West-supported Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, a terrorist militia backed by Iran, have been waging a power struggle since Hamas won parliamentary seats in last year's elections, closing four decades of Fatah rule.

Their brawl has spilled over into the civilian sections and into Israel, where rockets hit a school Wednesday, injuring no one but reminding everyone what would happen if Hamas fully takes over the Gaza Strip.

Israel would be vulnerable in both its south and north should this happen. Both Hamas in Gaza and the Iran-created Hezbollah, which has a foothold in Southern Lebanon, are dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. On that, they'll never compromise.

It would be unfortunate should Israel be drawn into the Palestinian conflict. But Israel, which until recent elections in Iraq was the only representative government in the region, has to protect itself if its security is threatened.

Abbas must get control of the situation in the Palestinian territories or risk letting the entire region burst into flames. He recognizes "the madness that is going on in Gaza now," but putting an end to it requires more than rhetoric. If Abbas doesn't have the necessary resolve, outside forces will have to intervene.

Divorce, Palestinian-Style - Claude Salhani
The Palestinians "are not 'heading' towards a civil war. They are in the middle of one," says Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. Moniquet says the Palestinians have been in the midst of a civil war "for several weeks, if not months." The Belgian counter-terrorism specialist says that European "political correctness, whereby one would like to present the Palestinians as eternal victims and never, in any case, as the actors (and the persons with primary responsibility) for their own failures," is what has prevented the violence from being labeled a civil war. (UPI)