Opinion: From New York's Newsday report of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: "Palestinians Friday celebrated what they consider their victory over Israel...
"'This pull-out is a result of our sacrifice,' he [ Mahmoud Abbas] said, 'of our patience, the sacrifice of our people, the steadfastness and the wise people of our nation.' Still, all was not calm among Palestinians. Two Hamas militants were wounded as they carried an explosive device that blew up accidentally near the evacuated Kfar Darom settlement."
Ah, well. Even when Ariel Sharon hands them a great "victory", some Palestinians can't stop blowing themselves up long enough to celebrate it. I've never subscribed to the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state - a weird and decadent post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty, even if it weren't so erratically applied (how about the Kurds then?). The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. The same with the Irish Republic.
By contrast, the world deemed Palestinians "deserving" of a state, and they've absolutely no interest in getting one.
Any honest visitor to the Palestinian Authority is struck by the complete absence of any enthusiasm for nation-building - compared with comparable pre-independence trips to, say, Slovenia, Slovakia, or East Timor.
So now Ariel Sharon has given them Gaza. On the face of it, this has a certain logic: the Zionist enterprise foundered in this unpromising territory. No more than a few settlers ever showed any gusto for this particular turf and, in the end, mustered no more than 8½ thousand Jews among 1½ million Arabs.
Nonetheless, the Israelis could have held it without much difficulty for years to come. Instead, Gaza will decay even further into a terrorist squat fought over by Hamas and Islamic jihad. And, in the long run, its strategic value - as the most appealing location from which to launch the more ambitious Islamist rocketry - will likely turn it into a latterday Taliban Afghanistan: jihad central masquerading as a political jurisdiction.
So why would Sharon enable such a move?
If you talk to the more deluded disciples of the New York Times school of foreign policy analysis, they'll tell you the Israelis are doing this as a good-faith gesture to the Palestinians, to the broader Middle East and to the bien pensants of the European Union and the United Nations.
I doubt the Israeli prime minister could peddle that one with a straight face at an international conference.
He knows the government of the Palestinian Authority is not a "partner for peace", only a centre of corruption whose only political opposition is even more deranged and violent.
And he knows the international community only has one response to Israeli concessions and that's to demand more, even as it's still flaying Israel for having the impertinence to withdraw from Gaza "unilaterally".
Sharon had won the 2003 elections in part because he opposed a pull-out from Gaza.
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Sharon has come to understand, as Bush did after September 11th, that the glorification of "stability" invariably favours the bad guys.
The world's embrace of the Palestinian "cause" is now almost complete: blow up a nightclub in Bali full of Aussie tourists and Scandinavian backpackers and within 10 minutes someone will have identified the "root cause" as the lack of a Palestinian state.
The current intifada has, in essence, been funded by European taxpayers - and the EU's auditors don't seem to care.
The withdrawal from Gaza was celebrated with promotional materials bearing the slogan "Today Gaza, tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem", which doesn't sound awfully like a "two-state solution" but was nevertheless paid for by the United Nations Development Programme, whose logo appeared just underneath that slogan.
Taking their cue from the Palestinians themselves, these various forces have little interest in a Palestinian state itself, only in using the lack of one as a means to undermine Israel and its legitimacy - which in Europe they've done very effectively.
A continuation of the status quo - whereby the Palestinians are preserved in perpetuity as "deserving" a state without ever having to earn one - would only see further remorseless deterioration for Israel in the world.
In that sense, any change in the situation would be for the better - especially a change that makes Gaza not Israel's problem but everybody's problem.
Thus, the Egyptians have just deployed their own troops to Gaza to replace the evacuated Israeli defence force.
Why would they do this now the Zionist oppressor has fled and Arab lands are rightfully back in Arab hands? Well, for a very obvious reason: an Islamist squat in Gaza is a far greater threat to the Mubarak regime than it is to the Zionists. With the Jews out of the way, the Egyptian government can no longer avoid seeing Gaza for what it is.
My National Review colleague David Frum came up with the clearest assessment of the Israeli strategy: "Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread, Sharon is forcing them to end their pretence and acknowledge the truth."
In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv - unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishisation of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that, in an ever more Islamified continent, the Europeans are the new Jews.
Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.