Mr. Olmert wants to go ahead with Ariel Sharon's misbegotten plan to unilaterally redraw the borders of what could eventually be Palestine. The key word here is unilaterally, because the Israelis are prepared to do this without any input from the Palestinians. They would be left to try to cobble together a country out of whatever remained behind.The New York Times, along with the rest of the MSM, just cannot even conceive that their basic assumptions are wrong.
The pre-conceived notion that has attained Biblical status among the left is that Palestinian Arabs somehow "deserve" a state.
I am not quite sure what criteria are used to make this assumption. Why, for example, do the Kurds not "deserve" a state but Palestinian Arabs do? Exactly how does a people attain the status of "deserving" a state?
If Gaza has taught us anything, it is that Palestinian Arabs cannot responsibly govern themselves. I cannot say for how many generations they will continue acting like infants with grenades, but it is manifestly clear that today's Palestinian Arabs do not have the capability to act responsibly even regarding their own people, let alone other nations.
The question is not "how to make a viable state out of the West Bank and Gaza." The question is, why on earth is this desirable? Why is the world throwing hundreds millions of dollars to a group of people who have shown no ability to govern, no ability to act maturely, no ability to build, no ability to even distinguish between right and wrong?
Is it because the UN decided that there should be a Palestinian Arab state in 1947? Of course not - the Arabs themselves didn't want it.
Is it because the West Bank and Gaza are/were "occupied"? Of course not - hardly anyone cared when Jordan and Egypt occupied the same areas.
Is it because the Palestinian Arabs finally recognized Israel at Oslo? Of course not - because they have withdrawn that recognition and no one even blinks. A state is still assumed to be the Solution.
The only real reason why the world says that Palestinian Arabs deserve a state of their own is because the Arabs have scared the world into thinking that if Israel would just give them what they want, we won't have any more terror attacks. In other words, it is a reward for the airline hijackings of the '70s and the Al Qaeda pronouncements of the 2000's. It is a Mafia protection racket on a scale that has never been imagined.
It is easy for the world to offer Israel as a human sacrifice to appease the Arab gods - because the world doesn't much like Israel anyway. So everyone from Osama bin Laden to the New York Times blames Israel for a problem that is being framed as Israel's fault rather than as a logical continuance of Arab and Islamic terror towards the West. The Palestinian Arabs have no responsibility according to the morally retarded "elite":
To a significant degree, the Palestinians put themselves in this spot by electing Hamas to run their government, and the Bush administration is right to refuse to legitimize a government dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But Mr. Bush should not punish the Palestinian people by endorsing any unilateral proposal — doing that would punish them for exercising their democratic right to vote.In other words, we can scold Palestinians for choosing a terror group to lead them, but to actually hold them responsible for it is just way too mean. No - it is Israel that needs to do everything the Palestinian Arabs demand, because, after all, it is somehow Israel's fault that they freely elected Hamas.
We have seen the Palestinian Arabs, over and over again, being handed an independent state on a platter. We have seen them, again and again, reject that state, always for absurd reasons that blame Israel. And we have seen, again and again, the New York Times swallow the Palestinian Arab narrative whole, so much so that their editors can no longer even notice the utter incompatibility of how Palestinian Arabs are acting today with statehood. Gaza is a brilliant lesson in how an ultimate Palestinian Arab state would look - but one cannot expect the New York Times to notice anything that obvious.
That would mean they'd have to admit they were wrong, and it is much easier to support another terror state than to admit that you are wrong when you are the Newspaper of Record.
UPDATE: See also AbbaGav's comments.