Justifying the prediction of the surgeon general

Bradley Burston in The Palestinians’ time is running out.

You have justified every last claim and prediction of the Israeli right.

Ponder that for a moment.

Let me digress. Say that you hear tha a friend of yours, Smoky Joe, a smoker for 40 years has lung cancer. You’d of course be sad. But would your reaction be “It’s a shame he justified the prediction of the Surgeon General?”

If you were callous enough, wouldn’t it more likely be “It’s a shame he didn’t heed the Surgeon General’s warnings?”

Burston demonstrates that he is unable to admit what is obvious: the Israeli right’s assessment of the Palestinians was correct. They said don’t trust Arafat. Israel did and brought him into Gaza and then Ramallah.

They said don’t give territory to our enemies. Israel did in 1995, 2000 and 2005 and in doing so strengthened Fatah/Hamas, Hezbollah and Hamas, again, leading to increased terror from each area.

(What did work? The military solution as Moshe Arens recalled last week:

But once the Israel Defense Forces and the security services began to seriously tackle Palestinian terror, following the massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya in the spring of 2002, it quickly became clear that terror could be defeated by force. As a matter of fact, it could be defeated only by the use of force. The terrorists view any hints of Israeli willingness to give in to a portion of their essentially limitless demands as a sign of weakness, which only serves to encourage further acts of terror.

Noah Pollak, who linked to Arens, observed:

The extent to which Israel’s military victory in the intifada is simply not acceptable for discussion in enlightened quarters is amazing as a matter of cultural psychology. But this refusal also has a crippling effect on Israeli politics, as the military option against Hamas is continuously framed as a foreordained failure.

Operation Defensive Shield, did roll back the terror capabilities of Hamas and Fatah. It also was very costly in terms of lives. But that doesn’t mean that it was a failure; the actions that necessitated Defensive Shield were the problem.)

Worse than acknowledging that his political opponents were correct, by dismissively referring them as “the right” Burston shows that he’s learned nothing.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who cited Burston, isn’t much better (h/t Instapundit):

I’ve been writing recently about the existential threat that Israel will face if a Palestinian state isn’t created. What I neglect to note is that the Palestinians already live in a state of national non-existence.

So Israel’s fate is dependent on the Palestinians creating their own state, a task they have refused to engage in over the past 15 years. And yet Goldberg has been arguing that Israel has a moral necessity to see that such a state gets created. Why should Israel’s legitimacy be subject to veto by its enemies?

If Gaza under Hamas were functioning, Goldberg would have to acknowledge that since Gaza was essentially a Palestinian state, the questionable demographic threat he fears, would at least be delayed. (In fact David Rivkin and Lee Casey argue that Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza anymore.) But Goldberg will have none of that. The Palestinians claim that Gaza is still occupied and he apparently accepts that.

By tying a Palestinian state to Israel’s legitimacy, Goldberg has given Fatah and Hamas and their related thugs the final say in whether or not Israel should exist.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.