An act of war
For years while Arafat was in charge of the Palestinian Authority (PA) the world lived with the fiction that the terrorist attacks on Israel were conducted by militant groups outside of Arafat’s control, while Arafat himself promised continually to rein in the terrorists. (He was of course the terrorist par excellence, but bizarrely feted by the UN as a statesman.) Now that Hamas is the leading party in the Palestinian administration this fiction is no longer tenable. For example, the BBC reports on the story of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in an attack in which two other soldiers were killed:
Militant groups in Gaza have demanded the release of Palestinian children and women from Israeli jails before giving information about a missing soldier.
It is the first such statement since the suspected abduction of Israeli tank gunner Gilad Shalit during clashes on the Gaza border on Sunday morning.
The signatories included the armed wing of the governing party Hamas.
(Note the BBC’s quaint reference to “clashes on the Gaza border,” when in fact the Hamas-led terrorists entered Israel via a tunnel to carry out a premeditated attack.)
The gist of the story is that Hamas - now the “governing party” in the PA - is directly attacking Israel. By any definition this is an act of war, and now there is no Arafat-inspired fiction to separate the PA from the terrorists. The Palestinian Authority has lost any claim it might have had to international legitimacy and it is only Israeli restraint that keeps it in power. Forget the UN’s deliberations (always strangely slow in condemning the Palestinians). Every state has the right to self-defense and the Israelis have for too long held back in the hope of peace. If this is not an act of war then the PA president Mahmoud Abbas must demonstrate this by turning in the terrorists - starting with his own government.
