When I was a young girl, I heard a story told of an old Jewish man, in which the final "punch line" was the old man's statement, made under duress, that the savior of the Jews was the Sabbath, and that their greatest enemy was Israel. I'm sure that the first part of the story was once a ha-ha funny joke about how Jews meet adversity with humor steeped in a peculiar, deep truth, but I was never sure what the point was in the latter. It always sounded like somebody had tried to tell two jokes at once, and hadn't gotten either right.
Still, I'm beginning to see how getting what was believed was your right may be precisely the worst thing for a people. As long as you have nothing but each other against the rest of the world, and you have no place you are forced to defend, you tend to stick together. Once you inherit the farm, the bickering can commence, and that can destroy whatever core set of values you may have once shared. It certainly saps the trust in one another.
According to Gateway Pundit, it seems that this holds true not just for Israelis, but for Palestinians, too. I wonder if this was what Sharon was expecting, or was it only a folorn hope?
On the other hand, I've often wondered if we over here put too much stock in Abbas as a leader. He never seemed to have much going for him, other than that moment when Arafat kicked the bucket and he was the only one left standing while the cameras were running.
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