Stardate 20020723.1613

(On Screen): Demonstrating just a small amount of its conventional military capability, an Israeli Air Force jet fired a missile at a building in the Gaza Strip and killed the commander of the military wing of Hamas. 14 others, many of them children, also died in the attack.

The Palestinians are outraged. "They're attacking our civilians!" they cry.

Members of the military wings of Hamas, Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat's Fatah movement and Islamic Jihad swarmed through the street of Gaza City today vowing revenge for what they described as a "massacre."

This strikes me as being just a bit disingenuous. I mean, you'd think that the Palestinians had never targeted Israeli civilians or anything like that.

I don't applaud the innocent deaths. But it seems to me that the outrage here is somewhat feigned, and it's leading to a non-trivial amount of posturing.

Sources close to radical Palestinian groups said that before the Israeli missile strike, they were on the verge of approving a far-reaching agreement to end attacks on all non-combatant Israelis in Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and pledging to police their members and expel those who did not abide by the new principles of non-violence against Israeli civilians.

"We had meetings for the last 12 days with all the Palestinian political parties in order to stop the suicide bombings, and we were very, very close" to a final agreement, said Saeb Erekat, minister of local government in the Palestinian Authority, who is one of the Palestinian Authority's top negotiators. "Now there are elements in our society that resist any call to stop suicide bombings, and they can use this as proof that Sharon does not want [a peace deal]. It's a mess."

In other words, "See what you made me do?"

I don't for a minute believe that they were really going to stop the attacks. Absent this Israeli action, it wouldn't have surprised me if they had said they were going to stop the attacks, but someone sometime somewhere would have found a pretense for starting them again. If it wasn't this, it would have been something else – assuming the attacks actually stopped at all.

They would have identified some provocation, some way in which Israel had done something unacceptable, and would have begun again.

This is a classic negotiation tactic. You're being forced, kicking and screaming, into doing something you hate, and at the last minute the other side does something you can use as an excuse to get out of the deal. So now that you're no longer in danger of having to agree, suddenly you start talking about how eager you had been and how close you had come to doing what you didn't want to do, but aw shucks you can't now because of what the other side did. It's all their fault, the despicable bastards.