By midday every Saturday, the mile-long main drag of Abu Gosh – an Arab village twelve miles west of Jerusalem – is jammed with hundreds of Israeli cars. Abu Gosh’s restaurants, shops and markets are crowded with Israeli families who made it a tradition to eat and shop here when Jerusalem’s Jewish shops are closed for the Sabbath. Even today, when incited Arab mobs are attacking Jewish neighborhoods fifteen minutes drive away from here, this peaceful tradition persists; nor can you discern any tension here, except for that of scurrying waiters and busy cashiers servicing the many customers.

Arafat’s decision to extort further Israeli concessions by violence has almost ruined the Palestinian economy, and confounded those advocating economic advancement as a precondition to peace.

Kalachniokov fire may gain Arafat the sympathy he seeks from the Arab street and from European chancelleries and media. It may promote his strategy of Balkanizing the conflict with Israel. But it does not produce goods and services, and it certainly does not encourage the massive investments in the Palestinian economy needed to create the jobs that can lift Palestinians from dismal poverty, and give them a real stake in peace.

The putative peace process has failed because it was based on the false assumption that politics can radically reshape reality.

Fantasies, often misrepresented as “vision”, can sometimes be politically useful. But once they clash with reality, they collapse like the Maccabia Bridge. Right into the poisoned muck.

Oslo was predicated on the notion that you can have “a peace process” between politicians (if that is the correct appellation for Arafat and his henchmen) above people’s heads. Sure, there was talk about confidence-building measures. But in reality, Oslo generated terror and threats that made most Israelis wary, while the Palestinian Arabs only suffered greater poverty and repression since Israel helped establish Arafat’s corrupt regime – that Arafat is skilled in manipulating their rage, directing it against Israel is another story.

Israeli high schools students can finally learn from two new textbooks (“Struggle and Decline, 1920-1945” and “Uprising and State, 1945-1970”) that the reason the Russian Communist Revolution ultimately failed “was the lack of crystallization of a proletariat and a bourgoise class”, and because “the peasant and the worker were not educated and failed to grasp the nature of the communist economy”. Had they been better “educated” and able to participate, Communism apparently would not have degenerated into a dictatorship, and could have saved humanity from the horrors of capitalism.