Why there may never be a real Palestine

In a Radio Blogger interview, there's this great exchange with Mark Steyn regarding Steyn's lack of faith in a true Palestinian state:

HH: Now Mark Steyn, last night, Frank Gaffney and I spent two grim hours at the Museum for Tolerance with a crowd, talking about the Sharon disengagement from Gaza policy. And we read from your wonderful interview with John Hawkins at Right Wing News yesterday, about your comment that the Palestinians really don't seem very interested in nation building. And we got to the point where it seems almost inevitable that Gaza will become Hamasistan, and a much more sophisticated version of Kabul. I wonder if we've really thought this through? MS: Well, the problem here is, and I don't believe...just let me say in an ideal world, I don't think that Gaza and the West Bank should be a Palestinian state. The original division of Palestine, in 1922, by which there became what we now regard as Palestine, in the west, and what is now Jordan, in the east. I think that was the division, and Jordan is the Palestinian state. But we're not talking about an ideal world. And what is clear is that I've been in countries that are on the verge of nationhood, and have nationalist movements. If you're in Catholic Belfast, you get a sense that these people want to be out of the United Kingdom. If you're...I was in Slovenia before it split away from Yugoslavia, and you got the sense there. You kept meeting intellectuals who had great plans for a Slovene state. But there's no sense of that in Palestine. These people...if it's a choice between Jew killing and nation-building, they'll choose Jew killing every time. And in fact, it's only the international community that persists in the delusion that there's some kind of nationalist movement here. There isn't. And I think you're right that they'll basically be a gangsta squad in Gaza. And if that's the case, and the Israelis have no other choice than kind of walling it off and leaving them inside there, it may well be the best solution.