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• Wednesday, January 7, 2009 06:20 PM

  @MMM

  Ending the occupation.

  And giving back stolen land. Offering reparations. Dismantling the settlements. Removing blockades. Etc.

  There's where you're mistaken, MMM- that is, if you're simply talking about returning to the 1967 borders (you're vague on that point.)

  For Hamas, that isn't enough. They have an ironclad commitment to nothing less than the dissolution of Israel, and its replacement with an Islamic state throughout the entirety of Palestine (and beyond that, actually, but that's only hinted at.)

  True, they don't want to kill all the Jews- they just want them to convert or leave- or perhaps, just to display their merciful nature, to dispossess their land holdings and assets and allow them to live in marginal communities, in submission to Islamic law, forever. Or else.

  All the pronouncements I've seen seem to indicate that they want an Islamic state that's more theocratically totalitarian than Egypt, Syria, or Iran.

  The possibility has crossed my mind that if the state of Israel has been trouble for the Middle East..imagine Arab Palestine ruled by the radical Islamists of Hamas.

  I suspect that Syria would probably roll the tanks and take the place out before too long. Egypt has too many of the problems of a large country with an expanding population to take on a project of conquest like that- but Syria? They'd be up for it. Unless Hamas managed to somehow overthrow or "ally" with the government of Jordan. Etc, etc.

  —cabdriver Read cabdriver's other letters
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