An excellent article by Max Boot: Exploiting the Palestinians.

Whenever the serious issues of the Middle East are raised, from oppression in Saudi Arabia to nuclear weapons development in Iran, the answer one hears from Europeans, Arabs, United Nations functionaries, all sorts of supposedly serious people, is invariably the same: The real issue is the Palestinians. Until we resolve their horrible plight, peace will never come to the Middle East. This is an absurd argument since even if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, this would not affect in the slightest the tensions between Islamic fundamentalists and secularists, between rich Gulf kingdoms and their poor cousins, between Shiites and Sunnis, between democrats and dictators, or the countless other San Andreas-sized fault lines that run through the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam). It is helpful to remember that all of the dead in the Arab-Israeli wars of the past half century amount to only a tiny fraction of the million killed during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the 100,000 killed in Algeria’s civil war since 1992, or the 100,000 killed in Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990.

Surely anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the Middle East knows that the plight of the Palestinians isn’t “the” issue. So why do so many people insist that it is? Let us count the reasons.

I’m going to quibble with one point he makes, though:

Many Palestinians are privately appalled at these “martyrdom operations,” which are killing their youth, destroying their economy, and empowering their religious fanatics.

I’m sure there are some Palestinians who are appalled at suicide bombings and the debasement of their society, but the latest poll on Palestinian attitudes shows that 62.7% support suicide bombings, 63.5% are in favor of “military operations” inside the Green Line, and 75.3% are for the continuation of armed struggle.