The Hamas Victory

The victory of Hamas in the Middle East region is evidently quite surprising. One thing it shows is that exit polls over there are not any better than they are over here. The other consequence of the election is the apprehension that this will inevitably lead to war between Israel and a group from Gaza and the West Bank which has vowed to destroy Israel. My own immediate thought was this was a hopeful sign for a meaningful move off ruts in the road. Some of this opinion was based on my tendency to think conventional wisdom on any subject is almost always wrong. The following response of Mark Steyn to a question about the probability of war confirms my thinking on the subject. The guy is a genius.

Well, I don't think it will...I don't actually think it will be a war. In a sense, I think in the immediate future, what it does is it gives Israel a greater leeway to secure itself with the wall. Nobody's going to argue when you're living next to Hamas that you don't have the right to build a wall. That argument, which the Europeans and other people have made, looks absolutely stupid now. But I think what it does tell you is that in the end, the Palestinians are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the Earth. Every city you go to...you go to New York, you go to London, you go to Paris, you meet talented, energetic Palestinian doctors and lawyers and accountants. All the talent got out of there in the late 1940's and early 50's. You imagine people, third, fourth generation, the people who stuck around because of this insane dream that they're going to get some olive grove of their great-grandfathers back one day, can you imagine what kind of idiot is going to stick around for sixty years for that? So it's the absolute worst of the Palestinian people who are in Gaza, and in the West Bank. And it's a terrible tragedy for them. But it is the fact that they've been wrecked by being essentially mollycoddled by the U.N. and world opinion for sixty years.