Hamas reached a political deal with moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday under the pressure of a Western aid embargo and a threatened Israeli offensive into Gaza to try to free a kidnapped soldier.

But the governing Islamist group -- whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state -- rejected any suggestion the deal could imply it now accepts Israel's existence.

With Israel and the Palestinians preparing for a possible Israeli push into the Gaza Strip following the tank gunner's abduction, there appeared little chance that agreement over the document could open a path toward peacemaking soon. - from this article

Everything that the cassandras warned would happen if the Israelis retreated from Gaza, a place to which they have a legal and historic and moral claim far superior to that of the Arabs, either the "Palestinians" or another other group (and let's not speak here of when most of the Sinai became Egyptian, way back in the mists of time, in far-off antediluvian 1922), has happened. Yet Olmert and the Israeli Left continues to believe that they should do the same with the "West Bank." No lessons learned. No desire to recognize that the conflict is endless, that it is based on the tenets and attitudes of Islam, that only firmly holding all of the land now held, land to which Israel has by far the strongest claim but that claim is seldom set out coherently by Israeli spokesmen or political leaders, as if they do not quite understand it themselves (Hint #1: start with the terms of the Mandate for Palestine. Hint #2: note the plans for an Arab state, a Jewish state, a Kurdish state, an Armenian state, and find out how those four promises made to four different peoples fared. Hint #3: ask yourself why Italy was allowed to approriate the Sudtirol, 97% ethnic German, after World War I, and to rename it the Alto Adige, and to keep it? Hint #4: what happened after World War II to the borders and German minorities in Czechoslovakia? In Poland? That's a start.).

The fact that there is no "solution" to the Lesser Jihad against Israel does not mean that Israel, if it ceases to pre-emptively surrender in salami bits, will lose. Who would have thought that the Soviet Union would ever break up, that Communism would be seen as the failure it is? Who could have predicted that in 1946? In 1956? In 1966? In 1976? Islam has declared itself; as more and more Infidels study the matter, they will realize that the Lesser Jihad against Israel is not the cause of, but rather merely one component of, the Greater Jihad that is being conducted, largely through non-military means, throughout the world.