Now, that is not nice, but we certainly prefer a strong Fatah—which cooperates with Israel on terrorism prevention—to honest Hamas or democracy (which, in the current political situation, is the same thing). It is in Israel’s interest to keep Fatah corrupt and its lynchpins fat and lazy. If, to that end, the Arabs want to suppress their journalists, we could not care less.

During the prayer, Arabs pelted the Jews with firebombs. Imagine the outcry if the opposite were to take place.

Under orders to abstain from fighting at all costs, the IDF troops refrained from shooting the attackers.

Now Jenin has become scandalous for the Palestinians. After Fatah militiamen attacked a local governor, the PA ordered a wholesale crackdown on its own militants there, with scores arrested for criminal activities. Recall that all of them receive pensions funded by Israeli tax transfers.

And what a stability that is! Near the Elon Moreh village fence, the army detained an Arab with a knife. Other Arabs were detained near Tapuah intersection for carrying knives and explosives.

The PA’s subsidies come from a budget largely funded by Israeli tax transfers and US aid. While both the Israeli and US populations are suffering from ever-increasing gasoline prices, the PA uses their money to offset rising prices.

Now the interesting part. Jews took protesters who had been injured near border crossings and checkpoints into Israeli hospitals, even though the rioters were technically in the Palestinian zone. As Rabbi Kahane used to say, Jewish guilt is like cancer; now we feel guilty for stopping the rioters.

There were no losses among the Palestinians. Constrained by crazy orders, the Israelis could not open fire on the murderous crowd, though live fire would have stopped the Arabs immediately and prevented further incidents for some time.

At the same time, Hamas treads the path of Fatah: as the major terrorist group grows moderate, it loses its reason for existence and is overcome by smaller groups, such as PRC and PIJ. Thus, signing a peace treaty with Hamas solves nothing for Israel.

Now, assassinating terrorist leaders is surely a commendable activity. The problem was with our subsequent actions. As usual, IAF resorted to targeted strikes in response to blanket attacks on our population centers. Such targeted strikes have very little deterrent effect, as we know. The balance, accordingly, is not good for Jews: eight people (foreign workers) were wounded in Israel while seventeen died in Gaza. With such a low casualty ratio, we cannot fight numerically superior Arabs.

The lesson is, when we target high-profile enemies, the IAF must be prepared to escalate quickly against major targets to decisively stop retaliatory attacks from Gaza. We should be bombing PRC headquarters and ammo depots when we kill their leaders, so that they realize that continued attacks would bring devastation on their military infrastructure. Indeed, this is not a bad thing to do periodically, anyway.

Their differences were minimal to begin with: Hamas insisted on full withdrawal to the 1948 armistice line, while Fatah allowed less than a 3% correction of it. Hamas spoke of a long-term truce, while Fatah benevolently offered us a Cold War-style peace.

Now Israel appears to be in an odd position: we refuse to negotiate with Hamas, but we finance and defend its clone, the Fatah.