It is hard to put an upper limit on the insanity that is the Middle East. According to the London Times, civil war in Palestine is close, and Jordan and Egypt will be helping Fatah against Hamas:

FORCES loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, are preparing for an onslaught against the military wing of the Islamist rival group Hamas in a desperate attempt to sustain his waning power. “Civil war is inevitable,” a senior Palestinian security official said last week. He predicted a bloody denouement to tensions heightened by a warning from Abbas that he will hold a referendum on proposals for separate Palestinian and Israeli states which the Hamas government refuses to accept.

“Time is running out for Hamas. We’ll choose the right time and place for the military showdown. But after that there will be no more of Hamas’s militias,” said the official as he sipped honey-laced mint tea in his sitting room while watching the antics of hooded militants on his television. “I read our daily intelligence reports about Hamas and know very well that these people are planning to overthrow our president by force.”…

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, announced last week that his government would allow Abbas’s personal guard to be armed by neighbouring countries. According to Israeli military intelligence officials, these would include Egypt and Jordan.

On the Jordan front, the always entertaining Debka reports: “Israel allows delivery of 200 M16 rifles from Jordan to boost Abu Mazen’s forces against Hamas militia.This is the first time Israel has permitted an Arab nation to give the Palestinians arms.” Even more entertaining is Debka’s tale of abuse heaped on Palestinian interior minister Siad Siam by Egypt:

They tie in rather with the unpublicized trip Siam, the Hamas government’s strongman, made to Damascus. He went there to ask Syria to hurry along the training of Hamas officers and NCOs so that they can return to the Gaza Strip and take up command positions in the independent military force Hamas is fashioning.

After he crossed the border from Gazan Rafah to the Egyptian sector, Egyptian security and intelligence guards at the Sinai roadblocks subjected the Hamas interior minister to jeers and indignities. Siam and his two bodyguards were taken out of their vehicle, which was driven back to the Gaza Strip, leaving him to travel to Cairo in a taxi squeezed in with 10 passengers. At every Sinai roadblock, they were had to submit to painstaking body searches. The Egyptian troops pretended not to recognize their VIP status.

Because of the hold-ups, the Hamas minister changed taxis twice. He arrived in Cairo in a rage, only to be lodged in a filthy hotel far from the city center. This incident occurred a week after the Hamas spokesman returning from Cairo to the Gaza Strip was stopped at the Rafah crossing and the 800,000 euros he was carrying was confiscated by Abu Mazen’s Force 17 presidential guard. Hamas leaders are sure that Egyptian intelligence tipped off Abu Mazen’s men about the cash.

Part of the reason for Egypt and Jordan’s current displeasure with Hamas is apparently its reluctance to compromise its absolutism, in this case regarding the hudna known as the Prisoners Document. That document calls for gradualism in the destruction of Israel, via Jerusalem Post, whereas, as the NYT put it, “Hamas has refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a permanent, sovereign state, insisting that all of the former Palestine is waqf — land given by God to Muslims, who can neither cede nor sell it”:

The 18-point document, known as the National Reconciliation Document, calls for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, and stresses the right of return for all refugees to their original homes. The document also calls for the establishment of a new body to coordinate attacks on Israelis within the 1967 borders.

We don’t pretend to understand all of the reasons that Jordan and Egypt have big problems with Hamas, or precisely what role Hamas and its affiliates have had in terrorizing and trying to destabilize those two countries. However, we are struck by the zero-sum lives so many of these people have, killing each other over nonsense and trivia when they could be getting on with making good lives for themselves and their countrymen. We know, yes, we know, it’s the Middle East. (HT: Roger Simon)

UPDATE

While the Palestinians and surrounding countries remain mired in poverty and complaints for decades upon decades, there is, as a counter-example and indictment, the recent emergence of newly capitalist countries, China and India, among others. China and India have created hundreds of millions of middle class citizens over the past few years, while the Palestinians and much of the Islamic world have been complaining about and plotting the destruction of six million Israelis. Indeed, China alone is creating up to 20 million new middle class people every single year because of capitalism. 5x the total number of Palestinians in existence brought out of poverty every single year in a former communist economy.

Think of the mindset of the Palestinian rulers. The West Bank has a population of 2.5 million. The Gaza strip has a population of 1.4 million. The GDP per capita is $1100 while that of Israel is 20x greater. Their unemployment is 3x that of Israel. You’d think they would want to deal with these problems instead of sitting around nursing ancient grudges.

If these people would knock off their complaining for ten minutes and get down to making life better for themselves and their families, the world would be a much better place. Every two weeks in China and India more is done by entrepreneurs, corporations and government to benefit people’s lives than is done for the entire population of Palestine, ever. Every two weeks. A new middle class is created in India and China that is more than the entire population of Palestine every two weeks through capitalism and modernity.

The socialist history of India and the Communist history of China demonstrate clearly that it is bad ideologies that entrap people and keep them down. If the Palestinians could shed some of their ideological baggage, they could quickly become more prosperous and happier. No shortage of funds would be available for the effort. Consider the power and pervasiveness of an ideology that gets people to choose victimhood and poverty over statehood and prosperity. It is no wonder that such an ideology would have to make unbelief a captial offense.

UPDATE II

When we think about the ease and the zest with which many in China and India have taken up with capitalism and modernity, we are struck by the power and pervasiveness of religion in the Islamic world — how people will cling to ancient beliefs despite their manifest failure to produce prosperity, invention or material progress. Yet the beliefs thrive, not only because of oppression, but also because they respond to some important elements of human nature.

Suddenly the Middle East makes more sense — unfortunately, tragic sense. How the Hamas fundamentalists must loathe everything that reminds them of the material superiority and godlessness of the modern world, from Israel to the cartoons of infamy to DVD’s to MTV. How they must hate the Jordanian and Egyptian accommodationists, whose brand of Islam is somewhat compromised and ideologically impure. Of course, there are darker aspects of human nature at work as well, since Islamism at once unleashes and harnesses men’s totalitarian and alpha male impulses. But for a moment let’s just think about the inevitability of this struggle between our modern concept of what is good in life, and the hatred and loathing our fundamentalist enemy must feel, as the way of life he has been steeped in from birth gets bombarded minute after minute with temptations and data from the modern world that all say: you’re wrong. The conflict of such deeply held beliefs is part of the very definition of tragedy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 8:50 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture, business, idiots!, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.