Road-map to Hell

Colin Powell has said that he can see signs of progress over the Middle East road-map. Israel, he noted, had taken measures which ‘constitute the beginning of the road-map process’. Well, that’s just terrific, Mr US Secretary of State, because we all know that the big issue is that Israel has not accepted the road-map, which all right-thinking people praise, and is therefore the main obstacle to peace.

So what were these Israeli measures? They released 180 Palestinian prisoners and opened up Gaza and the West Bank (closed to keep in mass murderers) as goodwill gestures. And what were the Palestinian goodwill gestures in return? They killed an Israeli gardener in the West Bank, fired rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot, and sent a human bomb on his way into Israel from Nablus, with more to follow. Israel promptly sealed off Gaza again. But, of course, Israel is being oppressive and inflammatory and needs to be pressured into line. Does not the BBC tell us this, repeatedly?

Certainly, Israel sometimes does things that are bad, and it should be censured. But, on the big picture, it is having to perform to a script penned by Kafka. It extends a tentative hand to people who persistently murder its citizens. As a result, still more Israelis get murdered. The international community fails to hold the Palestinian perpetrators to account and instead blames Israel for not accepting the road-map.

Er …isn’t the road-map’s very first requirement that the Palestinians ‘immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence’? Didn’t Colin Powell accordingly tell the new Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen to dismantle the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist infrastructure? And what was the ‘reformed’ PA’s response? Colonel Rahid Abu Shbak, head of the PA’s Preventive Security Service in Gaza, said that he had no intention of disarming any Palestinian, who had the right to continue to try to end the occupation of the territories.