Another dose of cold reality and pragmatic common-sense from Amir Taheri on the Palestinian election and the prospects for a breakthrough in the Middle East. Pointing out that just about everyone sees Mahmoud Abbas, the likely victor, as their second choice, Taheri soberly observes:

'It would be foolish to assume that we are at the threshold of a golden age in the Middle East. Nor is it wise to assume that Arafat, for all his many failings, was the sole cause of a deadlock that has caused grief to both the Israelis and the Palestinians since 2000.The truth is that hostility among Palestinians to the very existence of Israel today is greater than 13 years ago, when the peace process was launched in Madrid. Why? The Palestinian Authority under Arafat pursued a strategy of vilifying Israel, especially via the educational system and the media in the occupied territories, as a means of regaining some of the legitimacy that it had lost as a result of the deals it made in Oslo. Israel, too, is less ready for peace than 13 years ago. It is enough to scan the Israeli media, follow the Knesset debates and look at election results and opinion polls to gauge the mistrust that many Israelis, if not most, feel toward their Palestinian neighbors.'

The Palestinian attitudes are the crux of the matter. When one looks at the wall-to-wall vilification of Israel and the Jews in which Palestinians have been indoctrinated from the cradle, the lies they have been fed about Jewish intentions towards the Muslim and Arab world, the lies about the Jewish people drawn from Nazi demonology, the lies in the schoolbooks and the hysterical incitement to jihad and martyrdom broadcast regularly on PA TV, it is hard to believe that the Palestinians will now accept they have to live at peace with Israel. But Taheri puts his finger on an even more profound problem:

'Once we have established that this is an Israeli and Palestinian problem, and not an international one, the next step would be to ask the two protagonists to state exactly what they want in order to make peace. There are more than two dozen so-called peace plans named after various U.S. presidents, Israeli premiers, Arab kings and rulers and European politicians. But there is none named after any Palestinian leader. The truth is that no one knows what it is, in concrete terms, that the Palestinians want.'

One is reminded of the accounts by Clinton's negotiating team at Camp David and Taba, who reported that having been offered virtually everything that he had appeared to want, Arafat baffled them by simply saying nothing. He did not come up with another demand, as one would expect any party to a negotiation to do if he objected to the offer being made. He just stalled.

This ambiguity is surely because the ostensible cause for which the Palestinians are fighting, the cause that the west fondly and foolishly believes will solve the conflict -- the creation of a Palestinian state -- is a fiction, a camouflage, and a monumental distraction. To repeat -- the Palestinians were offered a state in 1937, 1948 and in 2000, and the Arabs could have created it for them any time between 1948 and 1967. They didn't want it; indeed, they didn't even think of it as their cause. What they wanted instead was the Jews out of Israel. The PLO was created before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. The original PLO aspiration was a Palestinian state in Jordan (three quarters of the original Mandate Palestine). And so on, and so on.

And so the Palestinian tragedy now -- and the tragedy for the Middle East -- is that all they know is hatred of the Jews, and their whole identity is bound up with being perpetual victims. They have been cruelly used as pawns; left to rot by the Arab League as pawns; had their minds manipulated as pawns; turned into human bombs as pawns; and confirmed over and over again in their victimhood by a decadent western elite as pawns.

What no-one has given them is a purpose of which they can be proud. So all they are left with is a state of perpetual demanding, without really knowing what it is that they want so that whatever is offered is never enough. That, and their undying hatred towards the Jews. Until and unless the Palestinians shake off this most lethal and poisoned of legacies, events like the election of a new 'President' will be merely markers in an unending tragedy.