Extract from "The True Believers"

Gaza is now sovereign Palestine. It has all the ingredients required by international law to be treated as a sovereign state. It has a government, territory, a population and the capacity to conduct foreign relations. It is a state. This is significant both for Israeli and international future dealings with the now-defunct Palestinian Authority (which must now be viewed as the government of Palestine) and for the Israeli Left.

It is true that the Palestinians continue to deny that they are a state. These arguments are both ridiculous and irrelevant. The statements to the effect that they still live under the so-called occupation elsewhere, or even somehow in Gaza, have neither legal nor rational grounding. They have a state. And now it is their turn to act like a state and build something constructive for their citizens.

If they choose not to act like a state but rather, as was the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, they decide to use their sovereign territory as a base for terrorism and war against Israel or any other state, then their inevitable and well-deserved fate will be that of the Taliban and Saddam.