World Leaders Delude Themselves Over Palestinian Intentions as Rockets Continue to Fall on Sederot

Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban; U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice; former British Prime Minister and current "Quartet" diplomat Tony Blair; and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (pictured above) got together to celebrate the outbreak of Middle East peace at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem Sunday Evening. They are all thrilled about the upcoming Annapolis conference, which unquestionably will bring Israel the "peace in our time" once promised to Great Britain by Neville Chamberlain. Prime Minister Olmert grandly pronounced, "At the top of the Palestinian leadership stand leaders committed to agreements signed in past years."

Unfortunately, even as these elites toasted the success of their diplomatic efforst, reality intruded on the poor and forgotten people of Sederot. Last week a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a terrorist militia affiliated with Fatah, the party led by Palestinian "moderate" and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, publicized that his group that uses the satellite imagery of Google Earth to help it identify targets for rocket attacks in the Negev desert town. Perhaps this technological innovation assisted the terrorists today, when rockets struck an electrical line, causing a complete power blackout in the beleagered town. Israel's pathetic government offers Sederot no succor, even as it continues to provide electricity, gas and water to the very enemy whose rocket attacks have placed the town under siege.

Sederot is a civilian town located entirely within the pre-June 1967 borders of Israel. The targeting of its civilian population by Palestinian terrorists demonstrates that when the Palestinians speak of "fighting the occupation by Israel of Palestinian land," they mean that they are fighting the existence of Israel, period. And the fact that a Fatah group, nominally under the command and control of Mahmoud Abbas, brags openly about those attacks proves that either "the top of the Palestinian leadership" is not committed to past agreements such as the Oslo Accords, which recognized the legitimacy of Israel's existence and required the Palestinians to cease terrorist attacks on Israel; or that the "Palestinian leadership" in fact has no control over its armed militias, and would be unable to deliver on its commitments in a peace agreement. In either case, further Israeli territorial concessions at Annapolis would be the height of self-destructive folly.