A Fool's Errand

Tony Blair’s off to the Middle East as a semi-plenipotentiary of sorts, but he looks to me to be plenty impotent. With the U.S. firmly on the side of the long Israeli project to eradicate Palestinian self-determination, no real peace will come of continued oppression and occupation and apartheid. The Western plan to prop up Fatah as a client regime won’t last. Puppets never do. The human dignity of a people can’t be suppressed forever. Unfortunately, we’ve now taught the Palestinians that all our talk about democracy means nothing, since we promptly strangled the legitimate voice of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas. Hamas -- which was once fostered as a bulwark against the secular, socialist Fatah, ah the bitter ironies of the past -- is going to end up looking like a moderate force in comparison to the nihilists who emerge with all hopes smashed.

Meanwhile, the realities on the ground are what count: Israel controls the air and the water and all the good land in-between, penning Palestinians into Bantustans. The settlers on the hills, in their fortress towns connected by their own highways, are like the pieds noir in Algeria, fanatical, vigilante colonialists who have stolen the best land, in yet another spasm of European colonialism. Of course, the other fact on the ground is demographic, which means that all the walls in the world can’t keep the peace.