Ideology vs. land

Editorial

The U.S.-proposed "road map" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians calls for a two-state solution. Yet official Palestinian Authority maps of Palestine encompass all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the state of Israel. Hamas and other terrorist groups want to push the Israelis into the sea; a two-state solution is anathema to their vision of a fundamentalist Muslim state.

The Palestinians are fighting a war of ideology. For the road map to be effective, it must become a war about land.

The conflict became ideological when states in the region rejected the U.N. partition in 1947 of Israel and Palestine and began using the Palestinians as ideological pawns.

Egypt and Jordan could have absorbed them as refugees. Other states in the region could have established an autonomous quasi-Palestinian entity.

Instead, they worked in association with the United Nations to keep the Palestinians in squalor, as their Israeli neighbors attained a First World quality of life.

Three generations of Palestinians grew up knowing only poverty and hopelessness. Fed by propaganda by their leaders and neighboring "Arab brothers," they grew to believe that the real enemy was not those nations that betrayed them - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq - but Israel, i.e. the Jews.

These conspiring nations have used the Palestinians as a thorn in Israel's side, and Palestinian leaders have used their own people to stay in power.

Israelis administered the West Bank and Gaza Strip and built settlements there only after the nations in the region and Palestinian leaders time and again rejected Israeli efforts to trade land for peace.

This hopeless setting has bred nationalist and fundamentalist groups - Hamas and Islamic Jihad - that preach an ideology that is not only anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, but also anti-Western. Their fundamentalist believers see the enemy as not just the Israelis but also the Americans.

But Hamas and Islamic Jihad are also the enemy of Palestinian moderates who dream of transforming a war of ideology into a war over land - a war that can be settled through negotiation and compromise.

For this transformation to take place, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and his allies must find the will to militarily oppose the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. If he cannot - or will not - Israel will have to continue to take the lead.

The Bush administration has a vested interested in moving this process forward, since Israel's enemies and America's enemies are the same.

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