Leftists Admit "Palestinians Won't Be Talked Out of Putting Down Their Weapons"

Giving Up on the Palestinians, by Larry Derfner (Jerusalem Post):

If the Palestinians had taken last summer's disengagement as a confidence-building measure and responded in kind by suspending attacks, instead of taking it as a sign of weakness that vindicated those attacks, things could have been different. But by the time Israel left Gaza, I realized the Palestinians - as a whole, not Mahmoud Abbas and the other powerless moderates - would conclude from this that terror works, and go out to do more.

I still believe that Israel has no right to rule the Palestinians, that ruling them is bad, not good, for Israeli security. However, the belief I've lost is that the Palestinians are a basically rational, reasonable nation, that they can be talked into putting down their weapons and making peace with Israel. What I believe now is that only Israeli military deterrence, which will no doubt require the periodic use of force, can get the Palestinians to stop fighting.

This opinion piece is representative of what many left-wing commentators have published in the past week. What is maddening, however, is that they chose to risk the safety and well-being of all to their essentially religious faith that is contrary to all evidence. The key admission is that Derfner believed until this point that "the Palestinians are basically a rational, reasonable nation that can be talked into putting down their weapons." And rather than exploring any of the evidence, the Left largely spent their time demonizing and even prosecuting those "right-wingers" who tried to point out the facts.

Israel and the West can still be saved by throwing off the leftism whose moral compass is reliably backwards.