The Intifada Comes to Jerusalem

From the stoning of cars to the Mercaz HaRav terrorist attack to the stabbing of Rabbi Yehezkel Greenwald, the next wave of terrorist attacks is converging on Jerusalem. This is no coincidence or random collection of attacks, it's the next phase in the Palestinian Arab agenda.

After Annapolis when the surrender of the West Bank and Gaza are all but done and Jerusalem is the point of controversy on the table, it was inevitable that Fatah, Hamas and the witch's brew of terrorist groups operating out of the PA territories would next turn their attention to Jerusalem and the Galilee. As had been predicted.

The daily rocket attacks are the Palestinian Arabs making war on Israel. The rising attacks in Jerusalem are the next phase of the Intifada within Israeli territory. Israel had been warned both by its own security experts and Zionist politicians as well as by Hamas that if Israel withdraws from Gaza, the next phase will simply move deeper inside Israel. That is what has begun to happen now. The use of a Galilee name for the terrorist organization that took credit for the Mercaz HaRav attack foreshadows the next phase of fighting in Jerusalem and the Galilee.

While the American and Israeli governments continue to misunderstand the nature of the enemy, the war draws closer and the ring draws tighter. In Iraq the United States has slowly and painfully learned that most terrorist groups consist of a small gang often centered around a family, ex-military or organized crime connection. Much like American organized crime. The more sophisticated gangs have a political leadership with limited authority who provides the guiding strategy and philosophy and most of all pays out the money.

Unfortunately those lessons have not been brought home to Gaza and the West Bank where the political leadership of Fatah and Hamas continues to negotiate as if they were national governments instead of middlemen between the money and arms providers in Tehran and Riyadh and the armed gangs in the streets who may be loosely affiliated with Fatah or Hamas depending on who has the most money and the network of gang alliances at that moment.

The idea of negotiating a state with Fatah and Hamas is as absurd and horrifying as negotiating the handover of Los Angeles to the Crips and Bloods. And yet that is exactly what's going on as the magic of international diplomacy and willful blindness has transformed gangs of armed thugs doing the bidding of foreign terrorists into a national movement so long as they have enough spokesmen in suits and ties handling the money and detailing strategy.

The Hamas takeover of Gaza showed how absurd the American idea of attempting to map national ideas onto armed gangs of terrorists. Not only did all the money invested in arming and training Fatah terrorists prove absolutely useless, but many of the Fatah affiliated gangs actually chose to side with Hamas once it was clear that Hamas had the upper hand. The battles between Hamas and Fatah were more in line with Al Capone than any actual war, quick sporadic gang shootouts near strategic locations followed by retreats. Captured gang members were brutally tortured and executed. The State Department looked on baffled only because they insisted on pretending that Hamas and Fatah were political factions, but they were simply each a collection of armed gangs and political opportunists who tried to control the gangs.

Now the next stage of the gang war is to seize new territories, Yerushalayim and the Galilee. Negotiations after all have minimal impact on an armed gang, which knows only law, the iron law of force. Each negotiation in good faith with terrorist gangs is really a surrender and a betrayal by a nation of those citizens it abandons to the brutality of the terrorists.