Abbas was elected six months ago. His forces have confronted Hamas far too few times. To promote one such instance is dishonest.

But if the moderate Palestinian president is shoved to the sidelines by Israeli military intervention, the result could be a post-withdrawal Gaza effectively ruled by Hamas and its allies.

Such an outcome might suit Israeli hard-liners determined to stop further territorial concessions or peace talks, but it would be a disaster for the Bush administration and U.S. interests across the Middle East.

Only Israeli hardliners would want to stop further terrirtorial concessions? Why are territorial concession treated here as the holy grail of peace? If territory meant anything, Hezbollah would have taken up knitting in 2000. If territory meant anything terror would have been reduced after Israel withdrew from Tulkarem, Jenin, Ramallah, Qalqilyeh, Bethlehem and Shechem (Nablus) but instead it got out of control.
There are two elements driving the terror war against Israel. 1) A hatred of Israel. 2) A failure of the PA to do anything about it. (Often the PA is working to encourage the hatred and the violence, but I'm trying not to be too ambitious here.)
Giving the PA authority that it hasn't earned will not help American interests in the Middle East. Creating a terrorist state will not help American interests. Less than two weeks ago London was attacked by Islamist terror. A Gaza preacher praised the terror attacks; in a way reminiscent of the way Palstinians greeted 9/11:

The preacher welcomed the “blessed acts” that took place recently in Iraq and Britain, and highlighted their proximity to the selection of an Olympic host for the 2012 games.

“The sounds of happiness were heard in London, and Osama Bin Laden came and redrew the map. He made sure that the voice of the surrendered will be heard in every place,” the mosque's preacher said.

The sermon was translated by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center , which emphasized that mosques under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority routinely incited for murder, and were being used by a variety of organizations with no effective supervision by the Authority.

No, a change of attitudes is the minimum of what's necessary. But the Washington Post doesn't worry about that.
Another annoyance is the way the editorial lauds the ceasefire:

At stake is more than the tenuous truce that prevailed from February until last week and that gave Israelis and Palestinians the most sustained respite from terrorism and bloodshed in five years.

But the ceasefire succeeded in its limited fashion not because of Palestinian efforts, but because of Israel's defense. The Post reported this week:

The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.

"More than 100 mortar shells and rockets" don't suddenly appear. They need to be imported or manufactured. Yet Hamas was able to summon up that number effortlessly; unmolested by PA security.
It's instructive to compare the Washington Post's editorial to one in the Jerusalem Post and one in the Washington Times.
A few weeks ago "Moderate" Mohammed Dahlan claimed that Israel needed to withdraw from Gaza, northward virtually until Ashkelon. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post makes the connection between Dahlan's claim and last week's terror:

The fact that the rocket attack on Netiv Ha'asara last week came a short time after PA minister Muhammad Dahlan took Israeli disengagement coordinators by surprise when he seemingly casually raised demands for that village's land cannot be written off as a mere unfortunate coincidence.

Some seemed to dismiss the attack, which killed 22-year-old Dana Galkovitch, and to take Dahlan's retractions at face value. But the fact that Netiv Ha'asara was subsequently targeted with such deadly precision leaves too little room for comfort.

We may be witnessing nothing less than the germination of the next set of demands to fuel further conflict following the projected completion of the disengagement from Gaza. Netiv Ha'asara's shelling speaks louder than Dahlan's wan backtracking. It and neighboring kibbutzim, all essentially Ashkelon suburbs situated inside the Green Line, have much to fear from the approaching border if that means mortar fire from closer range.

An editorial in The Washington Times noted:

Last week, Hamas, embroiled in an internal political dispute with the PA, fired approximately 80 rockets and mortars at Jewish towns in Gaza and Israel. Thus far, Israel has refrained from taking action to root out this terrorist threat. We expect that Mr. Bush will remind Mr. Abbas that this situation is intolerable, and that he would be making a grave mistake if he emulates Mr. Arafat.

That was written nearly two months ago.
It's hard to take the Washington Post's plea for Israeli restraint seriously. The breakdown didn't just occur. Israel has been restrained in the face of continuous provocations. That Israel hasn't suffered more losses in the past five months cannot is extremely fortunate.
The end of the Washington Post's editorial states:

It also means urging Israel to show restraint unless and until it becomes clear that Mr. Abbas cannot succeed. That would be a fateful and costly judgment -- and it is too soon to make it.

It would be a lot more convincing if over the past five months the Post's editors had not been ignoring Abbas's serial failures. Their failure to demand any accountability of Abbas gives them precious little credibility on this issue.
UPDATE: My outrage at the editorial was based on an impression. Jewish Current Issues, though, links to a recent Barry Rubin column, "What Ceasefire?" (The column is also available here.) Dr. Rubin gives the proof that my feelings were correct:

Given all these factors it is not surprising that Palestinians, including members of Fatah and the PA security services, continue to plan and carry out terrorist attacks on Israel. During the five months between the February 8 cease-fire decision by the Palestinians and July 8, Palestinians carried out 812 attacks on Israeli targets. In thousands more cases attacks were disrupted by Israeli arrests, security efforts or defensive operations.

Some attacks take place in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Others are aimed at Israel itself, though a higher proportion of these are blocked. The type of attacks include shootings at Israeli civilians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the firing of mortars and rockets, assaults on homes and economic targets, as well as against Israeli forces organizing the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

What makes the situation even more ironic is that the main factor reducing the number and effectiveness of attacks inside Israel has been the security fence so strongly opposed by the PA. If the fence did not exist, given the PA's own lassitude in blocking terrorism Israeli casualties would be much higher.

In other words, the ceasefire that the Washington Post so fondly recalls is more the result of Israeli forebearance than it is of Palestinian effort. So for the editors to call for more Israeli restraint is simply cynical. They are admitting, in essence, that peace will only come as long as Israel doesn't hit back too hard.
Of course the Post's editorial was good, if it was compared to a New York Times editorial from last week, "Aimless in Gaza:"

Mr. Sharon appears to have become so fixated on making the withdrawal appear palatable to the Israeli right that he has lost sight of the larger strategic calculus of building peace. He wants to advertise the pullback as a unilateral Israeli measure, undertaken for Israel's own reasons, and not as part of any larger negotiated deal with the Palestinians, or still worse, as a response to Palestinian terrorism.

He has become so determined to show that the Palestinians will not be reaping any rewards from Israel's withdrawal that he has shunned taking simple steps that could significantly improve the quality of Palestinian life in Gaza, like paying to clean up the rubble of the settler homes Israel intends to destroy, facilitating the reopening of Gaza's airport and finding ways to make border security less humiliating and time-consuming for Palestinians.

So the failure of disengagement to bring peace will be Israel's fault. All those terror attacks during the so-called cease-fire don't point to a deeper problem than whether or not Israel has sufficiently boosted the standing of Mahmoud Abbas. For sheer chutzpah the Times outdoes the Post.
Mediacrity shows how "Aimless in Gaza" fits the Sulzberger Indifference Template.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.