Bret Stephens has a powerful column today in the Saturday Wall Street Journal reminding us that Palestinians have a culture of violence that is separate from their problems with Israel.

Consider a statistic: In the first nine months of 2005 more Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians than by Israelis--219 to 218, according to the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Interior, although the former figure is probably in truth much higher. In the Gaza Strip, the departure of Israeli troops and settlers has brought anarchy, not freedom. Members of Hamas routinely fight gun battles with members of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas's ruling political party. Just as often, the killing takes place between clans, or hamullas. So-called collaborators are put to the gun by street mobs, their "guilt" sometimes nothing more than being the object of a neighbor's spite. Palestinian social outsiders are also at mortal risk: Honor killings of "loose" women are common, as is the torture and murder of homosexuals.

Atop this culture of violence are the Hamas and Fatah leaders, the hamulla chieftains, the Palestinian Authority's "generals" and "ministers." And standing atop them--theoretically, at least--is the Palestinian president. All were raised in this culture; most have had their uses for violence. For Arafat, those uses were to achieve mastery of his movement, and to harness its energies to his political purpose. Among Palestinians, his popularity owed chiefly to the fact that under his leadership all this violence achieved an astonishing measure of international respectability.

As Stephens points out, if the Palestinians got a state of their own, does anyone think it would be other than a poor country beset by internal violence that overflows against their neighbors. Witness how they looted and destroyed the greenhouses in Gaza that were left by the Israelis and could have provided the basis for building up the economy in Gaza after the Israeli pullout. Instead, they looted them and the so-called security forces were powerless to stop them. This is their culture and calling them a state will make no difference.