Exposed in Gaza: the Palestinians' civil war should once and for all end western delusions about their capacity for self-governance or peace with Israel.

Forty years is somewhat more than a generation, and a large enough span of time to assess the fruits from seeds sowed by one generation and reaped by the next. The Palestinian civil war and the trashing of Gaza in the days following the 40th anniversary of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war signify the death knell of a politics by which a people continue to innovate new ways for self-abuse. The seeds Yasser Arafat and his generation sowed just as they had inherited--and are leaving for their children to harvest as they have gone full throttle in murdering each other--were rotten.

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Palestinian unity was mostly a charade. But with the Hamas faction of the Palestinian Authority seizing control of Gaza through civil war, effectively removing it politically and by arms from the West Bank, an unforeseen reality has emerged in the long bitter Arab-Israeli conflict. This Palestinian fratricide poses for the western powers, particularly the U.S. and European Union, a big question: how long will these nurturers of Palestinian corruption and intransigence persist in their own delusion that more appeasement and bribes for Palestinians can furnish the final settlement of two states, one Arab and one Jew, as envisaged by the November 1947 UN plan for the partition of what remained of the Palestine Mandate?

The history lesson from the last century is irrefutable. Beginning with the announcement of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, in which Britain promised to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the sole objective of Arab politics has been to nullify Jewish rights by any and all means available. Between the two world wars, Haj Amin al-Husseini--a Palestinian-Arab and Muslim leader, appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by Herbert Samuel, a Jew and Britain's High Commissioner in the Palestine Mandate--led the fight against Jews by making common cause with Hitler and the German Nazis.

The West's response following the June 1967 Six-Day War (in which Israel pre-empted what they had reason to fear was an imminent attack by Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt) came in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 242. It set the principle of exchanging land for peace on the premise that Arabs would eventually accept the UN partition of Palestine and the right of Israel to a secure peace.

But while Palestinian Arabs led by Arafat went through the motion of accepting Resolution 242 in 1988, 10 years after Egypt signed its peace treaty with Israel, the Mufti's policy of annihilating the Jewish state was never repudiated. Instead, the Mufti's Jew-hatred was passed on to his successors as the lodestar of Palestinian-Arab politics.

Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization learned that terrorism can be rewarding. Instead of being shunned after Palestinian gunmen killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Arafat was invited two years later to address the UN General Assembly. When Arafat's politics of extortion, terror and airline hijacking almost destroyed Lebanon, the EU went ahead with its 1980 Venice Declaration to recognize the PLO as a legitimate negotiating partner. And after his embrace of Saddam Hussein, Arafat went on to sign the Oslo Accords, receive a Nobel peace prize and enjoy regular invitations to the White House--all the while assuring his people and supporters in the Arab-Muslim world that his diplomacy was merely a pause, a temporary truce with the enemy, in the struggle to "liberate" all of Palestine. The Mufti as the archetypal Arab Jew-hater could not have hoped for a more effective successor than the mendacious Arafat.

The West has persisted in its self-deception by adhering to Resolution 242 for mediating the final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. This policy, however, could only work so long as all Palestinian factions went along with the diplomatic charade.

The civil war has wrecked the charade and should disabuse the West of pursuing any further its failed policy of appeasing and bribing Palestinians to be partners in a negotiated final settlement. Instead, the West should recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish state, and work out with the Israelis the shape of a non-negotiable final settlement to be imposed on the Palestinian Authority. The progeny of the Mufti, Arafat's terrorist-trained children, can then be left on their own to work their way back into respectability and civil order, or continue descending into the hell of their making.