While it is obviously not good that terrorism is now the official policy of the Palestinian Authority, in a way, this simplifies Israel’s task of dealing with the Palestinians. After spending most of his life as a unapologetic terrorist, former Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat started renouncing the tactic publicly while still enabling and encouraging it privately. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize for signing a peace agreement that he never actually implemented and probably never intended to. All the while, his Palestinian Authority funneled money to terrorist groups and encouraged attacks on Israel. Such duplicity complicated matters for Israel, because the rest of the world insisted that the Israelis cut deals with a man who never lived up to any of them.
At least now, it’s plain for everyone to see where the Palestinians stand on the issue of terrorism. They’ve embraced it publicly and wholeheartedly. It just became a lot more difficult for the rest of the world to insist that Israel give away more land and security in the hopes of achieving a peace that the Palestinian Authority now, as a matter of official policy, has no intention of granting.
A low-insensity war has persisted for years, and it continues because the Palestinian side is too weak to achieve total victory and the Israelis have been held back by the rest of the world. If the Hamas victory leads to an upturn in violence—and it’s hard to imagine that it won’t—then the world will have no more excuses for trying to prevent Israel from fighting back vigorously. This election means that the world’s handcuffs are now off Israel.
The question is, now that Hamas is the establishment, will they be willing to sacrifice their newfound power and the luxuries that come with it in order to wage a war they’re not likely to win?
