Peter Wehner writes his analysis of the Gaza crisis in big, thick crayon:

It is as if a bully on the playground repeatedly assaults another child who is quietly playing on the swings. When the second child fights back, the teacher [read: the international community] criticizes both children for fighting. The problem is that one is fighting in self-defense while the other one is fighting out of aggression. To extend the analogy even further: in this instance, the bully is assaulting a child who set aside a section of the playground to give to the bully, in the hopes that he would be satisfied. Yet it turns out this only fueled his aggression.

I think reasonable people can disagree — even vehemently — on the historical contours of the Israel-Palestine conflict while still agreeing that Wehner’s analogy is deeply silly, and more than a little dishonest. I’m tempted to draw it out even further, going into the history of who kicked who off the jungle gym first, and acknowledging the competing claims to the sandbox, but I suppose it’s sufficient to say that a country which maintains a strangling blockade while aggressively expropriating land for illegal settlements cannot credibly be said to be “quietly playing on the swings.” Wehner’s playground analogy is apt only in the sense that it seems like something he came up with while riding the short bus.

Photo explanation here.

In a video statement today, President Bush seemingly condoned Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, saying, “Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people.” Minutes later, in the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino suggested that the war would help create “a more stable and secure” life for the people of Gaza:

PERINO: We understand the need to try to create a more stable and secure area for themselves and also for the Palestinian people, who have been held hostage by Hamas in Gaza since the summer of 2007. And we urge them to be very cautious when it comes to civilian casualties. We want to keep them to an absolute minimum.

Watch it:

Seconds after claiming Hamas has held Gaza citizens hostage, however, Perino seemed to acknowledge that Hamas had in fact been elected: “They won because the Palestinians, the people of Gaza, were frustrated with the services they were getting from the Fatah party, which was a wake-up call for the Fatah party as well,” Perino said.

The idea that the current war — which has so far resulted in the deaths of over 500 Palestinians — is somehow good for the people of Gaza is being echoed around the White House and the right wing. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack explained today that the Bush administration opposed an immediate cease fire because stopping the killing now would somehow not be to the “best benefit” of the Palestinian people:

MCCORMACK: You’re trading off against lives in the future that would be lost if you don’t go for a durable, sustainable cease-fire. We’re not willing to do that. … You have to take the set of decisions that you believe will ultimately best benefit the people of the region, whether it’s the Palestinians or the Israelis.

On Fox News Sunday yesterday, Bill Kristol claimed that war was the best way toward peace: “If you care about ultimately peace in the Middle East, this is the best thing that could happen.”

Former recess-appointed UN ambassador John Bolton writes that “war in the Gaza Strip demonstrates yet again that the current governance paradigm for the Palestinian people has failed.”

Terrorists financed and supplied by Iran control Gaza; the Palestinian Authority is broken, probably irretrievably; and economic development is stalled in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians are suffering the consequences of regional power struggles played out through them as surrogates.

Interestingly, Bolton doesn’t think that Israel’s imprisonment of Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank — both of which make any sort of normal Palestinian political or economic life impossible — merits inclusion in the list of problems with “the current Palestinian governance paradigm.” In fact, Israel figures nowhere in Bolton’s analysis of the current crisis except as an unfortunate victim of Palestinian rocket fire. This is like analyzing Iraq’s sectarian civil war of 2006-7 without mentioning that the U.S. had invaded and occupied the country, only complaining about the U.S. embassy being shelled.

Bolton then declares that “trying to create a Palestinian Authority from the old PLO has failed and that any two-state solution based on the PA is stillborn.”

Instead, we should look to a “three-state” approach, where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty. Among many anomalies, today’s conflict lies within the boundaries of three states nominally at peace. Having the two Arab states re-extend their prior political authority is an authentic way to extend the zone of peace and, more important, build on governments that are providing peace and stability in their own countries. “International observers” or the like cannot come close to what is necessary; we need real states with real security forces.

Demonstrating the sort of innovative thinking for which the U.S. Senate refused to confirm him, Bolton recognizes that this idea is hugely unpopular in Jordan and Egypt, but suggests this problem could be solved by giving them some money, or something.

What Bolton does not recognize, however, is that the Palestinian people actually have a claim to anything so quaint as their own independent state. We often hear that Hamas and other extremist groups must “recognize Israel’s right to exist,” (a red herring, as recognition is something that is achieved between states, not between an occupying army and a people under its control) but apparently Bolton doesn’t believe that Palestine is entitled to this right. Nor does Bolton consider what the Palestinians themselves might think about his antique Western plan for divvying up the Levant between various powers.