Chris Dominquez says Arafat's followers simply want to peacefully secede from Israel, innocent angels that they are. If that were true, then Arafat would have accepted what was offered to him during the Clinton administration -- "90% of what he was asking for" according to all the news reports. His walking out on these proposals proved that he was never interested in peaceful secession, or peace of any kind for that matter. His lifelong behavior demonstrated that his top priority was always to kill as many Jews as possible, period. All of them, in his dreams, I'm sure. This is not a defense of the Israeli state, but an attempt to introduce some reality here with regard to the topic of a Palestinian state.
There are no paralells between how the American states were formed -- voluntarily, as part of a confederation, endowed with the right of secession -- and the mess in the Middle East, as Chris asserts with his snide comment about me and decentralization. The classical liberal ideal of federalism is foreign to the Arab world. And creating another despotic dicatorship in the Middle East (a "Palestinian state") is hardly an example of "decentralization." It would be just one more centralized tyranny.
