A must read: Lee Harris’s dispassionate but utterly damning examination of one of the central problems of the Middle East: The Peculiar Institution: Understanding Why Palestinian Terror Is Different.

Terrorism is a Palestinian tradition that must end. But in order to bring about this desperately needed change, not only must the Palestinian people cease to show sympathy with their indigenous terrorist organizations, so too must Westerners, both in Europe and in the United States. Sympathy with the Palestinian people is in order, but not sympathy for the institution that has held them back from all progress toward a genuinely responsible civic polity.

For that is what terrorism has become among the Palestinians — it is their peculiar institution, the way slavery was the peculiar institution of the American South in the nineteenth century. For, like the slave system, terrorism, deployed as a means of achieving political goals, ends by poisoning the society that permits it to flourish in its midst. The only group that draws any advantage from its use are those who are ruthless enough to use it. Like slavery, it corrupts whatever it touches, and is of value only to those who live off it. Like slavery, it appears to be an institution that can only be destroyed by those who are willing to use extreme and drastic measures to eradicate it. And, lastly, like American slavery, Palestinian terrorism has its defenders, many of them decent and well-intentioned individuals. In what follows I will try to explain why these individuals are mistaken in extending their sympathy to organizations like Hamas and other “militant” Palestinian groups.

Read it all.