Die Cast

Oferet Yetzuka, named for a Hanukkah gift, a cast-lead dreidel, has paused its gift-giving.

Perhaps only part of the strip will now become Gaza Beach Redevelopment District / Business-Opportunity Zone.

And if Abbas/Fatah have any balls at all, they will listen to Dion Nissenbaum at Foreign Policy: Abbas can't walk back into Gaza as its Israeli-appointed viceroy. We've known this since June 2007. He is a politician without constituents.

If Abu Mazen is more than a Vichy turd, he will resign rather than reign over a broken Gaza. Dissolve the PA's fake parliament, call new elections, and demand the release of Marwan Barghouti.

He can, in effect, become the most popular man in Palestine only if he no longer wants to be its most powerful.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Olmert has given Ban Ki-Moon the explanation for today's bombing he so gravely demanded: Hamas was in your compound. We know this, because that's where our bombs landed. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Probably this rhetorical device came out in the Iraq lessons-learned briefings. The US's real problem was not that there were no mobile bio-chem weapons labs, no centrifuges, just a bunch of yellow pigment in a baby-food plant, no no, our problem was that we kept trying to find evidence. Every overturned semi-trailer was inspected for anthrax; every general's lawn was cut up in the hunt for radiation.

Why not just say the bombs got it? It worked with the phantom Syrian nuclear program, right? "Trust us, it was there. Of course, there's no evidence of that now. But it surely was there because that's where our bombs went."

Also, for the record, Hosni, if you're listening, Fatah is dead. Don't wait for the return of Fatah. And also, anyone watching this knew in advance -- in advance of the New York Times' crack news analysis staff, anyway -- that Fatah was dead.

On second glance, this part was news to me. Possibly it is real news, as opposed to analysis:

Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders.

A Palestinian pro calls Fatah's involvement "silly" and "naive."

Odds are he called it worse than that, you know, something like "a royal fist-fucking of the Palestinians by a bunch of Vichy turds in BMWs"

But the interesting part is that Israel floated the idea to Fatah at all. I mean, if you're going to pull some Robert Moses shit on a million and a half people, which come to think of it is Moses' scale, you need obstacles cleared. Israel needs to make sure that Fatah sees its chances of survival as related to Israel's chances of success. What's really being said is, "We're going to make Gaza into prime beachfront property, you can get on board or get out of the way."

There isn't going to be a role for Fatah beyond "shut the fuck up." A truce still hinges on commercial traffic into and out of Gaza being restored. And Israel has no intention of allowing that. After all, why stop now? From a PR standpoint, there is no difference between "a little bit monstrous" and "monstrous." It is a binary condition. Since a truce is going to cost something, namely opening Rafah, or else it won't hold, why not choose annihilation?
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