ATLANTA - Egypt has managed once again to seal its border with Gaza -- its second try -- but who knows for the long run?

The militant and terrorist-when-it-wants-to-be Hamas, which rules Gaza by force of arms, ripped away Egypt's first effort to restore the barrier, and order. Hamas presumably could do so again whenever it wishes.

Gazans poured through by the thousands when Hamas blew up the barrier Jan. 23.

The stampede was something of a PR coup for Hamas. Arab media tended to portray the event as the act of a hungry and desperate people, victims of an inhumane Israeli political blockade. And here and there in the West, perpetually Palestinian-dazzled commentators fell for the scam, too.

There were a few things wrong in those reports.

The Gazans weren't starving. Most who rushed into Egypt were buying cheap cigarettes and food for profitable resale back home. The blockade isn't inhumane. It definitely pinches, but Israel has allowed in measured food shipments and essential fuel and electricity. And the blockade has been enforced both by Israel and Egypt under a negotiated 2005 agreement and has broad international support, a reaction to Hamas' de facto coup after Israel voluntarily withdrew from Gaza.

Thus do the Palestinians once again get indulgent sympathy rather than progress toward their own state, their titular goal and an ambition Israel itself has endorsed through its last three administrations. The border mess, in fact, undermined the gingerly start that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had made toward reviving the peace process.

Has ever a people with genuine needs and legitimate ambitions been so ill-led for so long by so many as the Palestinians have been? And been misled so willingly?

l l l

ISRAEL HASN'T ALWAYS BEEN MR. NICE GUY. It drives a hard bargain, its imbedded settlements in the West Bank are needlessly complicating and simply wrong and it has ignored chances to make small concessions that could have been both safe and cumulatively ameliorative.

That said, Israel has been trying to cut a deal with its region ever since it was created by the United Nations in 1948. It has tried to barter land for peace since its neighbors ganged up on it in the 1967 war and Israel wound up occupying Palestinian territory.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza and got in return only rocket attacks; 225 rockets were fired from Gaza into the small city of Sderot in the week before the border's recent breach -- a border, by the way, often undercut by tunnels used to smuggle arms to Hamas.

The realistic and attainable interests of the Palestinians have been held hostage all along to militants' demand that no outcome is acceptable that doesn't destroy Israel -- a stand asserted in succession by the Arab states, which handed it off to the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, which ceded it to extremist outfits like Hezbollah and Hamas.

The political theatrics at the Gaza-Egyptian border are just another in a long line of the destructive distractions that the Palestinians celebrate as victories.

(Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.)