On her recent sojourn to Jerusalem, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced her intention "to try to help the parties (Israelis and Palestinians) come together to look at how they can move through the Roadmap." Towards that end, the Quartet - the United States, European Union, Russia, and the United Nations - is now meeting in Washington for a Mideast strategy session to discuss the matter. Truth is, there's not a snowball's chance in Gaza she can do it.



Nearly six decades of American mediation have registered only one lasting success - the 1979 treaty between Egypt and Israel - but that agreement was only made possible when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel. Nevertheless, in the tradition of uncompromising believers everywhere, Washington continues to reject all evidence that its faith in diplomacy might be misplaced. In returning to the Middle East to revive the now-defunct "Roadmap to Peace" and its theoretical quest to lay the foundations for an independent Palestinian State, Secretary Rice is living in fantasyland, at least until the fundamental nature of Palestinian society has changed.



In August 2005, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon got tired of waiting for the Palestinians to carry out their end of the "Roadmap" (by dismantling the terrorist infrastructures on the West Bank and Gaza), so he decided to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, dismantling the Jewish communities in Gush Katif (communities that have now been turned into terrorist training camps) and relinquishing the region to Hamas, Hizbullah, Al-Qaeda, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a host of other Islamic warlords who, at the moment, are more intent on killing each other than killing Israelis.



Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the erstwhile head of an already failed non-state has shown himself to be powerless to stop the chaos in his own land. His solution is that all factions should unite in turning their guns against Israel, not each other. Abbas exercises little or no control over the democratically-elected murderers of Hamas and has lost much of his traditional power base in his own Fatah party. His Palestinian Authority has made no attempt to rein in its anti-Semitic propaganda, Palestinian mosques continue to extol the virtues of martyrdom, fully two-thirds of Palestinians (according to a recent poll) continue to see violence against Israel as a justified act of "resistance" and Palestinian rockets continue to pummel southern Israel ? all of which represent a rather bleak prognosis for Palestinian society as a whole.



Despite all his rhetoric, Abbas's position concerning Israel has never changed and, more importantly, cannot change, given the nature of the society over which he presides. It has produced a society that fails to discipline its foot soldiers after they decapitate an Israeli reservist and use his head as a soccer ball, that routinely allows alleged Israeli "collaborators" to be dragged from their homes and shot in front of their families, that throws candies into the air to celebrate the murder of Israeli civilians, that mourns the death of the Butcher of Baghdad, and that extols the virtues of "martyrdom" in its classrooms, marketplaces, children's video games, essay contests, summer camps and on its billboards - a society that has a serious pathological problem that cannot be rectified through negotiations and roundtable discussions. Under such conditions, what can Israel possibly offer Hamas and Hizbullah short of its own national suicide?



Before the Palestinians can consider a settlement with Israel, Palestinian Arabs must come to respect the rule of law. Unless and until that happens, any negotiated agreement with them would be tantamount to a suicide pact. Yet, the international community has absolutely no qualms about telling Israel what is best for its security. Hamas is an international outlaw that seeks the destruction of a sovereign nation and respects neither the borders between states nor the international system that created them; so what's the point of seeking common ground with enemies dedicated to your annihilation?



Unfortunately, the only resolution to this conflict will come when the Palestinian culture of death has been expunged from Palestinian society, when tribalism gives way to democracy, when Palestinians come to value the lives of their children more than Paradise, and when the hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow are not built upon a foundation of hate and genocide, but on a reconstructed society that is prepared to educate its children on subjects other than "martyrdom."



So long as the Wahhabis control the Palestinian educational system, nothing can or will change. The "issue" between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be resolved through the imaginary power of negotiations any more than Winston Churchill could have negotiated a resolution of the "issues" with Nazi Germany or Abraham Lincoln with a recalcitrant Jefferson Davis on the future of a southern Confederacy based on slavery.



Secretary Rice is wasting her time, as is the Bush administration, in granting $98 million in funding for a Palestinian security force that it knows to be corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. In so doing, it is giving a free pass to dictators and despots who support the new Sunni "realignment" against Iranian ambitions. Both President Bush and Secretary Rice have said emphatically that such trade-offs during the Cold War sowed the seeds of Al-Qaeda in the late 1980s, so this latest initiative is not only short-sighted, but a betrayal of American ideals and of Israel for geopolitical reasons. These "why can't we all just get along" discussions have about as much chance of bringing peace to the region as a rabbi has of being elected prime minister of Syria.



Stabilizing the Middle East first requires the neutralization of all of the current radical Islamic elements that permeate both the West Bank and Gaza. Sadly, Israelis and Palestinians are not going to agree on anything of substance until a great deal more blood has been shed. Amir Taheri said it best in Commentary
:
With the exception of Israel and with the partial exception of Turkey, the entire Middle East lacks a culture of conflict resolution, let alone the necessary mechanisms of meaningful compromise. Such a culture can only be shaped through a process of democratization. Only democracies habitually resolve their conflicts through diplomacy rather than war, and only popular-based regimes possess the political strength and the moral will to build peace.
But such an evolution may take decades. In the case of the West, it took four centuries.



As a consequence, American and Quartet intervention to "resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem" will only facilitate the gradual dismemberment and destruction of Israel. It does not have to be that way. Sunni fear of Shiite Iran in the Middle East will continue to force the Sunni Arab world to seek American cooperation. It is in their strategic interest to do so. Contrary to the policy now being followed by the Bush administration, America does not have to pay for this cooperation by forcing dangerous concessions at Israel's expense.