The end of the 'guilty Israeli'

The rockets, though, are only a symptom of a deeper malaise: the willingness of Palestinian leaders to encourage their own people's suffering for political ends. Despite billions of dollars in foreign aid, successive Palestinian governments have done almost nothing to rehabilitate the nearly 60-year-old refugee camps. During a visit I paid to Gaza in the late 1990s, a U.N. official explained to me why. The fate of the refugees, he said, was being left to negotiations. When I asked whether he really believed that Israel would absorb Palestinian refugees, he replied: "All options are open."

In fact, they are not. No Israeli government will agree to commit demographic suicide by allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move into Israel proper. Under any two-state peace agreement, descendants of those refugees who left Israel in 1948 will have the right to return to a Palestinian state, not the Jewish state.

Gaza's people are being held hostage to a political fantasy. And the international community is abetting the tragedy. The U.N. actually considers Palestinians to be permanent refugees, to be protected in squalid but subsidized camps even though they live in their own homeland of Gaza, under their own government.

So long as Gaza refuses to heal itself, Israelis will rightly suspect that the Palestinian goal remains Israel's destruction. Not even a full withdrawal from the West Bank, they fear, will end the war, any more than the pullout from Gaza stopped the rockets. Israel's crime isn't occupying but existing.

And so we move toward the next terrible round of conflict. This time, though, for all our anguish, we will feel a lot less remorse. Because even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist.