To my Arab brothers - they won

Youssef M. Ibrahim wrote on JWR With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.

If you really mean it, I believe you will find Israel to be a very good neighbor, as long as you are not shooting rockets at them, sending suicide bombers in to kill them, etc.

We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that

We don't mean it. We like to focus the anger of our citizens at our oppression, and redirect it toward Isrel, but we saw what the did to four Arab armies in the Six Day War in 1967, and we don't want a repeat of that defeat.

we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel. Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948

When you go greedy.

is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967,

When you got stupid.

which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness. At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded,

And which you had a chance to show what sort of state you wanted when Israel withdrew unilaterally, using force on their own citizens.

and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends. You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win. In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day. What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots? We, your Arab brothers, have moved on. Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways.

And we have no intention of sharing it with you.

Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon.

We tried that in 1967.

Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you. Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza. The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

TinkertyTonk blogged Read it all. Unfortunately, I don't think they're listening

Kim Priestap blogged The Palestinian leaders have blamed their citizens' suffering on the Jews, and their people believed their lies because they were and still are too ignorant to know otherwise. They have been told that when the Jews are defeated and run out of Israel that their suffering will end. But, as most of their Arab brothers have already learned, that will never happen.

Now the Lebanese people also suffer as Hezbollah escalates this war of futility, egged on by not only Syria, but Iran, whose leader sacrifices them for his own ambition and ego.