Economist.com | Israel and Palestine

This link is from Instapundit.com.

What the Economist forgets is that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no government. They are occupied as much by the P.A. as by the Israelis. If it were safe to say so, I'd bet that there are plenty of them who breathed a sigh of relief when Sharon sent in the tanks.

When we had riots in L.A. after the first Rodney King verdict, the governor called out the national guard. The Palestinians don't have a national guard. What they have is a bunch of terrorists using their children as walking land mines. The Israelis haven't withdrawn in the past because there is no government to keep the peace in the Palestinian territory if they did.

They are shooting at people who oppose them, but I haven't heard of any shelling of restaurants or hotels or pizza parlors. I'm sure that innocent people have been killed and wounded, but none were targeted merely because of their ethnicity.

The P.A. may be Palestinian, but it certainly isn't an authority in the sense of a provider of government services, or a keeper of the peace.