That’s my headline, not Mark Steyn’s, of course — but, hey, compare and contrast:
The “Palestinian Authority” is not a fully sovereign nation but it holds roughly the powers the Irish Free State had in 1922. Many aspects of that settlement were obnoxious to southern Ireland’s “separatists” – the oath of allegiance to the King, the viceroy, their status as British subjects, the Royal Navy ports – but they nevertheless got on with building an Irish nation. Which is to say, boring stuff like fiscal policy and the education ministry and the department of public works.
Nobody in the “government” of Gaza wants to do that. They were left a lot of great infrastructure and viable businesses when the Israelis withdrew – and they let it all die. They were bequeathed 3,000 greenhouses that grew flowers and fruit for export – and they demolished them. Oh, sure, there’s still work to be found in Gaza: They’re big customers of construction materials, but they don’t use them to build factories or schools or tourist hotels, only a network of state-of-the-art concrete tunnels under the border with Israel, so they can sneak in and kill Jews. In the Sixties and Seventies, many anti-colonial movements used terrorism to advance their nationalist goals. Hamas uses nationalism to advance its terrorist goals.
