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No Springtime for Palestinians?
(Jewish Ideas Daily) Sol Stern - Do not the Palestinians, at least as much as any of the other peoples of the Middle East, need a new beginning of consensual government? Consider Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians suffer under a regime so repressive that Mubarak's Egypt seems like a bastion of liberty by comparison. Six years ago in Gaza, Israel voluntarily withdrew its forces all the way back to the pre-1967 lines, making possible the birth of a Palestinian mini-state, without even asking for land swaps that would have preserved the Jewish settlements there. Through its indiscriminate rocketing of Israeli towns, Gaza's ruling party has made clear that it means what it says about the replacement of Israel by a Palestinian Islamic state. For Hamas, the 1967 line is of little interest; the struggle has always been over the UN partition plan calling for a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian Arab one.