Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters believes that the Palestinians, in bringing Hamas to power, have, for all intents and purposes, voted for war with Israel:
Unless someone can show widespread voter fraud on behalf of Hamas, the Palestinians should be judged by the choices they have made this week. They have chosen war and the annihilation of Israel over the two-state solution favored publicly (if not fervently) by Fatah. Europe and the United States need to wake up from their delusional dreamland of a situation where both sides in this conflict want a peaceful conclusion and a world without hatred for their children and grandchildren. Clearly, the Palestinians want war, and they have made no secret of using their children and grandchildren as bomb fuses in order to perpetuate it.
The first item on our list should be an absolute end to all aid to the Palestinian territories and government. The US should not subsidize Hamas, nor should it give money to a people whose only aim appears to be genocide.
Second, the US should allow Israel to respond militarily to any and all provocations -- no more pressure from Washington on Tel Aviv to moderate their responses to suicide bombings and missile attacks. And if Hamas and the Palestinians still want to wage war after that, then let the IDF roll across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and push the whole lot of them right into the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. That's what total war means, and as soon as the world stops preventing the Palestinians from the risks of their own choices, the sooner they will conclude that war is the worst possible choice for them.
It's hard to find cause for optimism in the results of this election. The Palestinian people know what Hamas stands for, and, in what will probably have been an act of ethnic suicide, they pulled the lever for them. There is no people in the history of the world who have so deliberately thrown in their lot with terrorism. Any hope for peace in the Middle East has gone by the boards. Short of a miracle, war is as inevitable in Palestine as anything in human affairs can be.
The Palestinians had a chance to establish a state in Gaza and the West Bank if they would be willing to live in peace with the Israelis, but in yet another manifestation of the Islamic death wish, they loudly proclaimed in the election Wednesday that they are not so willing. They have chosen their fate, and the U.S. should, as Morrissey insists, stop subsidizing them immediately. We can not, and must not, have anything to do with a terrorist state, much less send them taxpayer money to finance their crimes. May God help the innocent Palestinians who didn't want Hamas and who will surely get caught in the middle of the coming conflict. Their government certainly won't.
UPDATE: Emanuele Ottolenghi writes that Hamas' electoral victory was not what they wanted and will be its undoing. It's a very interesting column. You can read it here.
