The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - Accepting Hamas' victory might save Olmert's plan

While I don't personally agree with Nimrod Novik's thesis of acceptance of Hamas and a "hudna", he raises several worthwhile debating points, and indicates that Lieberman's land swap ideas might well be acceptable to the other side, in spite of the popular media's reference to it as "ethnic cleansing" (by the way, a "hudna" is a "truce" with your enemy sanctioned by the Koran for the specific purpose of allowing Islam to rejuvinate its strength to permit it to go on to final victory in that specific Jihad -- again, this reinforces the notion that Islam is a religion of absolutes with one final goal, domination, not coexistence).

I found this article by chance as I was looking around researching the Gemayal assasination. As an aside, it points out that Lebanon supports a Western-style dialog in its press that you will not find in many other places in the Arab world (when was the last time an Israeli published a column in Al Ahram in Egypt?), which reinforces the importance of Lebanon to a moeratig Middle East. I also note that the author, Nimrod Novik, was my teaching assistant in "Intro to International Relations" in my freshman year at Penn. He was a think tank and Labour party guy, brilliant and a nice guy.

The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - Accepting Hamas' victory might save Olmert's plan