Every few years I find it necessary to write a column re-emphasizing that unhappy fact. Israel exists because, in 1948, a large number of European Jews, decimated by the Holocaust, established a Jewish state there, on land they had once dominated and which their religion taught them had been given to them by God. Many thousands of the Palestinians living there fled, or at any rate left, and have survived as refugees in nearby Muslim nations. They and their descendants, and the Palestinians who remained, have demanded "their" land back ever since.
Most of the world, and in particular the United States, having acquiesced in the creation of Israel in the first place, has continued to hope that a compromise peace can be achieved between the two sides, and meanwhile Israel, with indispensable American help, has turned itself into a military power thoroughly capable of self-defense and even armed with nuclear weapons.
But the Muslim nations of the region have, of course, remained loyal to the Palestinian cause, and continue to support it with economic and even military aid.
In the teeth of the determination of the two sides, the United States has stubbornly persisted in promoting a "peace process" which has predictably gotten nowhere, and President Bush's "road map" is simply the latest casualty of this illusion.
The ultimate outcome of the struggle will depend on developments -- demographic and political -- that cannot now be foreseen. But the victory of Hamas over Fatah basically changes nothing, because there was nothing to change. Eventually, by virtue of financial or other pressures, the "peace process" may conceivably be reconstructed and stumble on. But the underlying quarrel will not go away.
In the long run, the recognition of an elemental truth is never a mistake. In that sense, even Hamas' victory may constitute a sort of progress.