Gaza Awaits Hillary Clinton

By Dale McFeatters

Scripps Howard News Service

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will become the second member of her family to have a crack at reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

Bill Clinton came achingly close in 2000 only to have the clock run out on his presidency even as the indefatigable president seemed close to wearing down the intransigent Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

President Bush took office with a promising ``road map to peace," but he was soon distracted by Iraq and, in any case, his heart never seemed to be in pressuring the Israelis to stop the expansion of West Bank settlements or to grant confidence-building concessions to Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas.

Unhappily for Hillary Clinton, when she takes over as secretary of state the status of her No. 1 foreign-policy problem is infinitely worse than when her husband left office.

Gaza is now in the control of the hard-line group Hamas, which ousted Abbas' ineffective Palestine Authority. The authority backed a two-state solution. Hamas unambiguously wants the Israeli state destroyed and the Jews gone.

Since taking over, Hamas has shot over 6,400 largely ineffective missiles into Israel, hoping to hit random civilian targets.

It continued to do so despite a ceasefire and now seems to have come into possession of longer-range, more-accurate Iranian-supplied missiles, jeopardizing ever-larger swaths of Israel proper.

The Israelis retaliated with a weeklong air campaign, but they face fearful obstacles. The Gaza Strip, with 1.5 million people in 130 square miles, is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and, with one of the world's highest birthrates, one of the youngest ― an average age of just over 17 and a median age perhaps as young as 15.

Even precision weapons are likely to hit civilians, and young ones at that. But Hamas seems to take almost indecent relish at the more than 400 civilian casualties and is seemingly deliberately provoking Israel into a ground incursion.

Hamas, whose senior-most leadership is safely in Damascus, Syria, seems to believe that the civilian casualties will cause the world to rally around its cause, but the world has been slow to rally other than to call for a ceasefire that neither Hamas nor Israel seems prepared to accept just yet.

The problem is exacerbated because a new U.S. government is taking office, the current Israeli government is about to leave office and the two Palestinian governments don't recognize each other as legitimate. Maybe the second Clinton will be a charm.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).

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