Stephen Plaut remarks in Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) that the win by Hamas can be good in that it will awaken Israel and the world as to the seriousness of the situation with the Palestinians. He points out that the whether Fatah (the PLO) or Hamas is in power is a distinction without a difference.

For months, the media were all in suspense over whether the victors in the “election” would be the Hamas terrorists or the PLO terrorists. As it turned out, Hamas evidently won the “election” by a huge majority.

The first part of the absurdity in the message daily inculcated by the Israeli political elite is that there is any significant difference between the PLO and Hamas. There is not. Both are equally dedicated to unlimited terror and violence, to genocide and the eradication of Israel in any form and in any borders. Both have conducted suicide bombings and in fact, if I am not mistaken, the PLO’s terror brigades carried out more such attacks than Hamas did over the past two years. The Kassam rockets are at least as much the initiative of the PLO as they are that of Hamas. The PLO proliferates anti-Semitic propaganda as much as Hamas and is just as allied with the Hizbullah, Syria and Osama Bin-Laden.

But the Israeli establishment has been repeating the empty “we have a peace partner in the PLO” mantra for so many years that they managed to fabricate artificial suspense over the Palestinian “election”. If the PLO were to win, then “Palestine” would be ruled by moderates, people with whom Israel could strike a deal, could do business – the pragmatists. Nice Nazis. Israel has been awash in speeches by politicians and mindless bumper stickers proclaiming: “We have a peace partner.”

Now, this may strike you as bizarre, but I have been arguing that the best thing that could happen in the Palestinian Authority “election” would be a strong Hamas victory. Let me explain.

A strong Hamas victory is the only thing that stands a chance of forcing Israelis to open their eyes and wake up. As long as the PLO is in charge, the gigantic game of make-pretend continues. When the Hamas is marching about with costumes of suicide bombers and with its swastikas and other paraphernalia, then there can be no delusions about the Nazification of the Palestinians. It is not that the Palestinians would really be any less Nazified with the PLO in charge. It is just that the Abu Mazen-type representatives at the Potemkin negotiations, and the make-pretend respectability of the PLO hoodlum chiefs, allow the politicians and the media to continue acting as if there is a peace process.

The Hamas victory – and I wish it had been stronger – puts the lie to the game of make-pretend. No longer can any intelligent Israeli pretend that there is any way to deal with the Palestinians other than war. The only way to stop the Kassams and suicide bombers is R&D – Re-Occupation and De-Nazification. And with the Hamas in charge, everyone in Israel is forced to acknowledge this.

Hamas has only one goal – the destruction of Israel. There will be no acknowledgement by Hamas or the Palestine Authority of Israel’s right to exist or any commitment to disarm. The world can delude itself that now that Hamas has power it will moderate its militantcy. That only shows its naivete about Islamic terrorists.

The fact is that Islamic radicals do not want a Jewish state in the Middle-East. They want the area to be totally Muslim. They want the area to be Judenrein (cleansed of Jews). If that term sounds familiar it was used by the Nazis in Germany.

Israelis, particularly the left, have deluded themselves into thinking that it could negotiate peace with the Palestine Authority. They felt that Mahmoud Abbas could be a “partner for peace.” That was never the case. At least now with Hamas in control, Israel will realize that the only solution to peace in the Middle-East with the Palestinians is, unfortunately, going to be war.

Plaut concludes:

Leftist after leftist proclaims that the solution is to negotiate with Hamas. After all, Hamas is as “genuine” and “representative” of Palestinians as the PLO, and it even wins “elections”. Some Hamas officials are encouraging the trend of self-annihilation in Israel by putting out duplicitous statements about how Hamas acknowledges that Israel exists (as an empirical reality that needs to be corrected, that is). Such statements recall Yasser Arafat’s duplicitous words.

So, get ready for new calls to enter into negotiations with Hamas. We can try to persuade them to have a salad bar on the cattle cars transporting Israeli Jews, and perhaps institute recycling and free tuition at the concentration camps Hamas is seeking to build. Israeli professors will soon be wearing their Hamas lapel pins. Hamas poetry will soon be taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Israeli schools will be screening films celebrating the heroism of Palestinian suicide bombers (like the University of Haifa screened Paradise Now this week).

And Second Shoah Now will be the fastest growing movement in Israeli society, holding mass demonstrations for peace in Rabin Square.

It is time for Israel, and the rest of the world, to realize that the Palestinians are now under the control of a group of radical Islamists who want nothing less than the destruction of Israel, and who will do what they can to achieve that, while they will deceptively hold themselves out to the world as a group that can make peace with Israel.

I also believe that Hamas’ sister organization, The Islamic Brotherhood, in Egypt will eventually take over that government. Israel and the United States will have to deal with radical Islamist organizations or terror organizations in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Palestinian territories and Egypt. It doesn’t look good for the U.S., for Western civilization, for peace, and especially not for Israel.

Awake from your slumber, O Israel.