The Hamas can't rely on getting a pass on murdering Israelis if they are in sole control of Gaza. Iran is a non sequitor. The key is the relationship between the Hamas and Egypt, which is rather good right now. Why don't you stick to book reviews or cooking shows or something?

...can be overstated.

Basically, in the elections to the Palestinian legislature, everyone had two votes. In one, which determine half the seats, you just chose which party you liked best. Hamas won this but it was very close (44 percent to 41 percent).

Each voter also had to cast votes for their local representatives. In these races, Fatah was unable to settle on a list of candidates, so there were too many Fatah candidates running; the Fatah vote was spread out, to Hamas' benefit. That's why Hamas ended up with such a landslide overall (74 legislative seats vs. Fatah's 45).

Not that Hamas doesn't have substantial popular support, but it made that support go further thanks to its discipline and Fatah's chaotic incompetence. Emblematic of a lot of things, really.

This is only peripherally related to the article itself, but I also wince when I see refrences to Hamas' "landslide victory." With the same voting support that was actually displayed in the election, Fatah probably could have cobbled together a pro-Oslo front with smaller parties if it had just had a decent campaign strategist.

Aluf Benn managed to write an entire article about the situation in Palestine without mentioning the "O word" once. The fact of the matter is Abbas has no control over the West Bank. He only controls a few disjointed Bantustans crisscrossed by for-Jews-only roads and raided by the Israeli army on a daily basis.

Israel and the US will give Abbas everything except for the one thing he truly needs: an end to the occupation and apartheid in the West Bank! The reason is Israel's appetite for West Bank land and resources has been fully satisfied yet.

Unfortunately the US is tying its foreign policy to an apartheid regime that strives on war and occupation.

So how many Palestinians in Palestinian political leadership roles have the Israelis either assassinated,blownup,abducted and imprisoned or expunged since 2002?

When you keep killing/disappearing a peoples leaders what is your real strategy?

When fully sanctioned elections are held and Israel and the United States get all pouty about who won and put in motion a process to erase that elections outcome what's up with that?

It is plainly evident the Israelis are using the GWOT to camo their deeper intents and purposes for Gaza and the WestBank.

Olmert surely is quite the actor with his posturing and posing.He is quite the Kabuki artist with his mask changes.

Until the United States gets smarter(don't hold your breath) it is ever so likely Israel will only continue to do what it has been doing since 2002.

It has been suggested by some(Noam Chomsky one of them) that Israel is fully intent on precluding the Palestinians from ever forming a viable political or sovereign existence.

The record of the last 5 years,10 years and 15 years supports that view in many large and small ways.

Israel is doing what it wants in the WestBank no matter what anyone or any group says about it being illegal and not morally or ethically well-founded. Israel is taking what it wants. And then taking more. Got it?

Israel is the puppeteer to the Palestinian Authority puppet. Failure to see or understand how that is taking place/being done -- who controls the tax money payments,passports,visas, border crossings,roads,permits,utilities and airspace -- is surely at the core of this conflict.

There is only one country here,Israel,running the show.

Maybe the realistic thing to do is simply admit it and include the Palestinians in Israel and the WestBank/Gaza.

Of course the Israeli zealots would rather commit to inflicting a lot more mayhem,deathdealing and expunging to get somewhere other than that outcome.

The Americans surely are exhibiting levels of ineptness and ignorance everyday all over the ME these days.

Israel seems intent on gaming that ineptness fully.

Israel however is facing a demographic wave whereby at some not too distant point there is going to be an Arab majority population.

The arithmetic is not in Israels favor.

The Israelis are losing on the moral/ethical/political points.

The Americans are not doing well in this ME dance macabre and when the Americans run out of money or moral credit(it is a tight race these days) they likely will not be in this dance at all.

The Americans surely are not the Palestinians friend and they are working hard to prove that with the Iraqis as well.

The Bush/Cheney gang is all for ME cliffjumping and even speeding up to do it faster.

See Iran.

It'll be the same old, same old. Steal the land, steal some more. Push the Palestinians into ever smaller ghettoes. Steal their livelihoods. Steal their health. Steal their dignity. If they resist, jail 'em or better yet, exterminate 'em. And all the while, play the victim. Hell, the Israelis have all the time in the world, and nobody's holding their feet to the fire. Terrorize the Palestinians long enough, just keep grinding 'em down, eventually they'll just disappear. Problem solved.

. . . . I guess that passes as RealDeal's heavy sense of sarcasm (Annie 'The Stick' Coulter comes to mind) while he sallies through Salonistan, sticking it to the resident Salonistas and Saloniks (Jaysus spare us) with his pithy and witty barbs. Sorry, RealDeal, you ain't even invited to the party, so I guess you can't be the brightest boy here. Not that you are, anyway . . .

How clever the letter-writers here are! It's so clear! The Palestinians' internal political problems are all the Israelis fault! Of course! How stupid of me! I should have realized!

It doesn't matter that Hamas essentially declared war against their political opponents once they won their election. It doesn't matter that Hamas staged a civil war, the victory of which they celebrated by throwing one of their political opponents out of a 15-story window. It doesn't matter that Hamas, the current ruling party in Gaza, has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, and has re-commenced lobbing rockets back over the border at Israel. It doesn't matter that the Palestinians are treated as badly, if not worse, in other countries where they are also minorities, like Jordan and Egypt, but we never hear about it here, due to the less-than-open press policies in those counties. It doesn't matter that various cynical Arab regimes have been using the Palestinians as a convenient political football for 60 years. No, none of this matters; the political problems in Gaza and the West Bank--where the Palestinians have autonomy, mind--are all the Israelis fault. Those damn Jews! They deserve it!

You people are simply amazing. Israel is about the size of Vancouver Island. You have no idea how tiny it is, and how many people are crammed into it. You have no idea how much the Arabs want the Jews out of there forever. And they have no where else to go, nowhere at all. Lots of other Arab countries. Lots of other Muslim countries. No other Jewish countries. None. But no, none of this matters. No, the Palestinians' internal problems are all the fault of the Jews, not the fact that they can't friggin' govern themselves.

Give me a break.