LESSON OR POST-MORTEM? Was Spinoza a Zionist?

Perhaps it’s time to update our Spinoza. It’s not so much that nature abhors a vacuum anymore, it’s that terrorist will thrive in one.

The Democratic party meme is now two-fold on foreign policy: a) withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible and b) re-engage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But there is no Israeli-Palestinian peace process right now. Not when, as Charles Krauthammer put it last night, “Hamas has won in Gaza, it will take it over. And it is the worst of elements.”

So might we take a lesson not from the 1970s forced withdrawal from Southeast Asia, which left us with killing fields and slaughter, but, say, 2005? The world wanted Israel out of Gaza, just as so much of the Democratic party wants us out of Iraq. Israel left Gaza. And the void was filled by the laying of tracks for the peace train? No, not hardly—rather, Iranian supported Hamas took over. There is now a new Hamas government on the border of Israel and Egypt, and a new Iranian state in the Middle East. Nice work. Might this be a lesson about withdrawing from such places when it is clear to the naked eye that terrorists are salivating at such possibilities?

Or is one man's salivating terrorist just another man's freedom fighter--with an appetite?

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestinian Civil War and Hamas and Fatah and US and President Bush