The Goldstone Factor

Point Of View
The Goldstone Factor \ Yossi Klein Halevi August 13, 2009
Yossi Klein Halevi, Senior Fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, explains how the Goldstone report may change the scale of the next Middle East War. Read also in Point of View on The Demons of Normalization by Uriya Shavit and When Everything is a Crime by Yagil Henkin.


The Israeli reactions to the Goldstone report on the Gaza war of January 2009 have focused, understandably, on its outrageous omissions and distortions and one-sided judgments, as well as on the moral corruption of the report's sponsor, the UN's Human Rights Commission. But the far-reaching strategic implications of the Goldstone report require no less urgent consideration.

If a large part of the international community endorses the report's conclusions and opts to put Israel on trial – symbolically or literally – the clear message to Israel will be the rescinding of its right to self-defense against Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which are embedded in civilian populations. That will require a basic rethinking of Israel's current strategic policy of containing the terrorist enclaves on its northern and southern borders.

In the decades following the Six Day War, Israeli policy, upheld by successive Labor and Likud governments, was to deny terrorists a foothold along any Israeli border. That was, in part, the rationale behind Moshe Dayan's open bridges policy between Israel and Jordan in the 1970s, as well as Ariel Sharon's West Bank settlement drive and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When that war soured, so did the appeal of the policy that inspired it.

Israel's two unilateral withdrawals – from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 – both resulted in the creation of terror enclaves on its borders, negating long-standing strategy. The policy of prevention was replaced by a policy of containment.

That policy of containment was expressed in the 2006 operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and by this year's operation against Hamas in Gaza. In both those mini-wars, Israel opted not to uproot the terrorist enclaves, hoping that the partial flexing of Israeli power would deter further aggression.

The Goldstone report may well mark the end of Israel's limited wars against terrorist groups. Israel cannot afford to continue to be drawn into mini-wars against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians to attack Israeli civilians, given that each such conflict inexorably draws the Jewish state one step closer toward pariah status. Limited victories on the battlefield are being turned into major defeats in the arena of world opinion.

That untenable situation may well leave Israel no choice but to return to the post-1967 policy of preventing altogether the presence of terror enclaves on its borders. Better, Israelis will argue, to deal decisively with the terror threat and brace for temporary international outrage than subject our legitimacy to constant attrition, even as the terrorist threat remains intact.

Israelis will be keenly watching the pace of Qassam rocket fire from Gaza for signs of an emboldened Hamas. If attacks do intensify – as they have in recent days – and the quiet achieved by the Gaza offensive is forfeited, the Israeli public will blame the Goldstone report. And Israelis' operative conclusions will likely lead to a less restrained response next time – the oppposite result Judge Richard Goldstone sought to achieve in his attempt to deny Israel the right to self-defense.

Which Way for Hamas?

Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009

By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck

Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement

by Zaki Chehab

Nation Books, 250 pp., $15.95 (paper)

Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence

by Jeroen Gunning

Columbia University Press, 310 pp., $34.50

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas

by Paul McGeough

New Press, 477 pp., $26.95

1.

Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

Such talk is not the only effort to return to normality. Parasols and beach cabins sprouted this summer along Gaza's twenty-eight miles of sandy shore, the crowded strip's principal public park. Two buildings of the Islamic University, Hamas's most prominent educational institution, had been bombed but the university put on a graduation ceremony with festive lights, a cascade of multicolored balloons, and heart-shaped posters wishing future success to its students, most of whom happen to be women and some of whom flashed jeans and high heels beneath their black gowns. In a theater next to the Palestinian parliament, also shattered by bombs, actresses danced and writhed in the government-sponsored premiere of Gaza's Girls and the Patience of Job.

Such events reflect one side of the ongoing conflict inside Hamas between the pragmatists who put Gazans' needs first, and have sought to lighten their lives after years of punishing blockade and intermittent war, and the ideologues who give priority to "the rule of the sharia of God on earth." Advocates of the latter have tried to apply Islamic law in full, appealing to the Gaza-based and Hamas-controlled Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to replace the British Mandate–era penal code with a sharia law that provides execution for apostasy, stoning and lashing for adultery, and the payment of blood money counted in camels. So far, the pragmatists have largely frustrated their efforts. "You can't Islamize the law when the political system is not fully Islamic," says the PLC's general director, Nafiz al-Madhoun, who completed a doctorate in law at the University of Minnesota, and once lectured there. "You need to have an Islamic government, judiciary, and political system. And we don't."

---

---

In response, the ideologues have resorted to other means, introducing sharia by the back door. With the help of Hamas mosques, the Religious Endowments Ministry has commissioned a morality police to "Propagate Virtue and Prevent Vice," not least by patrolling the beaches for such signs of debauchery as unveiled female bathers and shirtless men. The police have set up arbitration committees in their stations, offering detainees a fast-track resolution by fatwas, or legal opinion, which sometimes comes from the Muslim Scholars League. "The law of God or the law of a judge?" the police have asked petitioners. The Education Ministry insists it has issued no requirement that schoolgirls wear the jilbab, the shapeless body-wrap, but at the start of the school year, some principals did.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (in Arabic, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya—hence Hamas) remains powerful, but nearly four years after winning the 2006 elections, and two years after its gunmen overpowered Palestinian Authority (PA) forces to seize control of the strip, Hamas no longer acts like an opposition suddenly thrust into power. Silent a year ago, the Ministry of National Economy now negotiates with entrepreneurs seeking licenses for their latest project. The ministry's small-business scheme offers interest-free loans for such things as a $5,000 freezer to put a butcher back in business. The Local Affairs Ministry runs a licensing office for the tunnels to Egypt that remain Gaza's lifeline; the Public Works Ministry is repaving roads with smuggled tar; the Foreign Ministry has commissioned an American journalist to train diplomats; and the Finance Ministry is collecting taxes with increased rigor. A comprehensive Web site (www.diwan.ps) gives details of government appointments and decrees, with greater transparency than the PA, Hamas's counterpart in Ramallah that once ran both parts of the Palestinians' territory, but now runs the West Bank alone, and that under an Israeli thumb.

Hamas has revamped the civil service, pruning departments that under the bloated PA had more undersecretaries than clerical secretaries. Initial protests by Fatah loyalists after Hamas's takeover in June 2007 gave Gaza's new masters an excuse to lower pay grades and shed jobs. "It was a gift from God. Most were already redundant," according to an Interior Ministry official who says he has cut his twelve-member staff (including nine directors-general) by a third. With government salaries paid promptly, most of the time, Gazans make use of strike-free municipal services, including buses and schools. Should Gaza again have a functioning railway, Hamas would run trains on time.

International attempts to isolate Hamas have also helped instead to entrench the Islamists. With all but the most basic goods banned from Gaza, smuggling has thrived through supply lines that Hamas controls. Since 2006, despite Israeli bombing and increasingly effective Egyptian policing, the number of tunnels has grown from a few score to over a thousand. "The siege has empowered those the international community wanted to disempower," a Gazan businessman observed.

Of the nearly 30,000 people the authorities say have received jobs since the party took power, some 25,000 are in the security forces. "You can dial 100 and the police come," a banker said. "Under the PA, police were afraid of thieves, now the thieves are afraid of them." Before the Hamas takeover, says another, he and his friends chose their most battered car when they went to a restaurant, for fear of car thefts. This summer, the jammed streets were full of new cars, a tacit rebuke to Israel's two-year ban on vehicle imports.

The internal calm is matched by an external reprieve. When Israel withdrew in January, leaving 1,387 Gazans dead (according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem), thousands homeless, and factories, schools, and infrastructure smashed, Hamas hailed its survival as a great victory. But Israel imposed its own terms, forcing Hamas to quietly drop demands that Israel lift the blockade before Hamas stopped lobbing rockets at the Jewish state. While the range of Hamas's rockets has increased from fifteen to forty kilometers, bringing Tel Aviv suburbs within reach, Hamas has, since the end of the Israeli incursion, fired rockets rarely if ever, and restrained Islamist rivals, such as Islamic Jihad, from doing the same. Between March 17 and September 22 Gazans fired some eighteen short-range rockets without loss of life. Israel has responded with incursions and sometimes fatal bombings. In effect, Hamas now acts as Israel's border guard, preventing further attacks. Israel's swap of twenty female Palestinian prisoners for the first video footage of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier Hamas captured three years ago, has raised guarded hopes in Gaza of a bigger deal to come. In exchange for Shalit, according to Hamas leaders, Israel will soon release hundreds of Israel's ten thousand Palestinian prisoners and might even relax the siege.

To the south too, Hamas hints of better times ahead. Whereas in 2008 Hamas brashly punched a hole through Egypt's border defenses, unleashing an embarrassing stampede of Palestinians into Egyptian shops, Interior Minister Hamad says Hamas now "coordinates fully" with Gaza's sole Arab neighbor. Hamas even poses as a guardian of Egypt's national security, not least by killing al-Qaeda's self-proclaimed preachers and other adherents in Gaza. "Our task now is governance, to consolidate stability rather than continue resistance," says Hamad.

Yet a day after speaking these soothing words, the interior minister offered a very different political horizon. Between towering bodyguards from Hamas's armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, he delivered an apocalyptic address to a summoned assembly of clan elders. It was angels that chased Israel's army from Gaza in last winter's war, he thundered, adding with a numerological flourish that whereas Israel beat twenty-two Arab nations, Gaza's Islamic resistance had routed the enemy in just twenty-two days. The Jewish state, he concluded, would disappear in 2022.

Such reverses in rhetoric reveal a movement struggling to reconcile two competing audiences: the "international community," which calls for Hamas to be more moderate, and a core constituency that grows suspicious at any sign it might be selling out. Much as Communist regimes tacked "Democratic" to their names to disguise totalitarianism, Hamas officials use the word "resistance" to hide the waning of their armed struggle. The culture minister, when he attends theatrical productions, speaks of Resistance Culture. The minister of economy hails recent openings of cafés and restaurants as triumphs of the Resistance Economy. "As long as we don't raise our hands in surrender and continue to struggle, that's resistance," he said.

Hamas has failed to achieve the prime requisite for a more normal life: ending the siege. Gaza under Islamist rule is a cul-de-sac. Air and sea routes are blocked. Only the very sick, wounded, or well connected are allowed passage through sporadically opened land crossings to Israel and Egypt. Few now even bother to attempt the humiliating process of crossing the border, either with Israel or Egypt. "You can't board an Egypt Air plane to get home via Cairo without a fax from Egyptian intelligence," a Gazan graduate of Harvard Business School said.

While some Gazans profit from the boom in contraband, most people have seen their savings, salaries, and businesses atrophy. For all the talk about entrepreneurs, nine tenths now live below the poverty line, according to the UN, which estimates that living standards have plummeted to pre-1967 levels. In Israel per capita GDP is $27,450; in Gaza it's two or three dollars a day. Even merchant families collect UN rations.

If war and siege have not crippled Hamas, Gaza's misery appears to have prompted its greater willingness to compromise and offer its people a political future. Hamas leaders, including the more outspoken exiled leadership based in Damascus, have lately muted criticism of Fatah in the interest of intra-Palestinian reconciliation—even after Abbas's Palestinian Authority reportedly bowed to Israeli pressure and withdrew its demand for UN action against Israel following Justice Richard Goldstone's UN report into war crimes by the belligerents in Gaza's winter war. They have played down the significance of their party's fiery founding charter, which rejects any recognition of Israel, hinting that they could live with a two-state settlement. In its draft laws, Hamas defines "Palestine" not as the area including Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza but as the geographical district over which the Palestinian National Authority rules. As leaders of Fatah did a generation earlier, some members have discreetly met with Israelis at international conferences, talking peace over breakfast. In addition, within its own fiefdom Hamas's leaders have decided to suspend declaration of an Islamist state and application of sharia, and to focus on the economy instead.

Such changes in position are offensive to Hamas's hard-core followers. For what have they struggled, if not for establishing God's kingdom on earth? Rumors in Gaza reinforce the image of a leadership straying from the straight path. Businessmen working with Hamas are said to be investing tunnel profits in renovating plush hotels, prompting some to speak of an emerging Hamas oligarchy. A minister's son reportedly deals in drugs, and the son of a Qassam commander smokes water pipes. The security forces, too, seem to be following the pattern of the region's self-serving police states. Hamas used to threaten external foes and defend its own people, say Gaza's whisperers. Now it does just the reverse.

After Friday prayers on an August afternoon, Abdel Latif Moussa, a preacher in Rafah, the principal town on the Egyptian border, addressed scores of armed supporters. If Hamas did not have the guts to declare Gaza an Islamic emirate, he said, then he would do so, right here and now. Within hours of Moussa's sermon, masked fighters from Hamas's Qassam Brigades surged into the neighborhood. Among the twenty-eight killed were Moussa himself and several Qassam fighters, some felled by the first recorded instance of intra-Palestinian suicide bombing.

This was by no means Hamas's first sign of ruthlessness toward fellow Palestinians. During the first intifada against Israeli rule, which erupted soon after Hamas's official founding in 1987, its nascent armed wing targeted suspected collaborators, prostitutes, and drug dealers as often as it did Israelis. Islamists had long clashed with Fatah activists they called "traitorous" before Hamas's 2007 putsch against them, which culminated in street fighting that left more than one hundred dead. Since then the Qassam Brigades have sprayed gunfire at Fatah demonstrators and knee-capped Fatah organizers until they stopped demonstrating. They have laid siege to rebellious quarters of hostile clans and lobbed rocket-propelled grenades inside until family elders agreed to surrender.

But during August's shoot-out in Rafah, Hamas was not fighting "traitors," but rather its own brothers—people who prayed at the same mosques, studied the same texts, tapped the same financial backers, and used much the same terminology that Hamas used to overthrow Fatah. Such ultra-puritan Islamists are broadly known as Salafists, adherents of a belief system originating in Saudi Arabia that seeks to replicate fully the practices of the Prophet's companions.

Some Salafists have sought to infiltrate the ranks of Hamas, where they find fertile ground for recruits, particularly in its armed wing. Others have fused their search for purity with a jihadist challenge to the established order. Some eschew politics altogether, limiting their activities to preaching. Though dedicated to eliminating foreign influence, their teachers are among Gaza's most widely traveled, having studied in South Africa, Pakistan, Yemen, and Europe. Moussa had studied under such teachers in the Khan Yunis town, before shifting to the jihadist track.

Cracks emerged when Hamas drifted from social activism and armed struggle into politics. After Hamas decided to contest the 2006 elections, one of its preachers in Rafah left the movement with scores of followers. God's will above man's, he said, and besides Hamas had no business participating in an authority established by agreement with Israel. During the contentious interregnum of national unity government before Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June 2007, both Fatah and Hamas solicited Salafist support. Unruly clans seeking an Islamist cover to press their claims bolstered their ranks. Amid the chaos, the Salafists sought to enforce their authority by waging a nasty morality campaign against Internet cafés, hairdressers, the American school, and other such places of ill-repute.

Armed confrontation with the Salafists followed fast on the heels of Hamas's takeover. In July 2007 the Qassam Brigades laid siege to the stronghold of one jihadist group, the Army of Islam, forcing the release of the BBC's kidnapped correspondent Alan Johnston.

In the months that followed, Hamas fought to extend its control, sending the members of the Army of Islam fleeing to other towns. There they sought to rally support among discontents, challenging Hamas's legitimacy with harder-line Islamist rhetoric that accused it of selling out both on its application of sharia and its resistance against Israel. They set up new cells, variously claiming affiliation with al-Qaeda and ridding Gaza of idolatry with such acts as removing the statue of Palestine's unknown soldier from Gaza City's central square.

One of the largest factions, the jaljalat—Arabic for "the reverberations of thunder"—acquired significant support inside Hamas, and sought to target high-profile visitors to Gaza, reportedly including former President Jimmy Carter. Jund Ansar Allah, the Army of God's Companions, led by Moussa, was a relatively new addition. Its operations included a cavalry charge by white stallions intended to emulate early Muslim warriors, notwithstanding the landmines on Israel's fortified border. Qassam Brigades stormed a house in the Khan Yunis refugee camp used by the Jund in mid-July, uncovering money, weapons, and explosive belts. Soon after, a bomb blasted the wedding of a nephew of Fatah's former strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, wounding sixty-one. It was after this that Qassam forces targeted Moussa's base in Rafah, the Jund's strongest redoubt with its easy access to tunnels and regional support. Salafists fleeing Rafah found refuge further north, sparking more clashes around Gaza City when Hamas sought to capture them. In two days, Hamas officials said they detained 250 Islamists.

In an attempt to deflect a Salafist backlash, Hamas officials have made a show of honoring the Jund's dead as martyrs, along with their own. They have sought to reaffirm their Islamist credentials with a morality campaign called Fadila, or Virtue, intended to tighten the Islamists' spiritual grip. The Religious Affairs ministry has hired seven hundred new employees to regulate public mores, by such actions as checking couples' marriage licenses.

A sense of unease is again enveloping Gaza. Ramadan, a time of festivity, proved desultory, and not just because of the siege. In what is Hamas's greatest security breach to date, Salafist Web sites published hit lists of Hamas members, detailing their rank in the movement, their tunnel hideouts, and mosques where they can be targeted. Jihadist spiritual mentors did not endorse calls for revenge attacks, and some instead urged unity and calm. But Gaza's streets and mosques were noticeably more subdued after the Rafah bloodshed. Hamas checkpoints—which had all but disappeared from the Gaza Strip—reappeared in the heart of Gaza City, sometimes during daylight hours. The few foreigners Israel allows to visit, who for months had experienced a brief respite, relaxing on its beaches and Web surfing in its wi-fi-equipped cafés, now tend to venture into Gaza in armored cars.

Hamas's resilience and ingenuity in the face of intense challenges are a largely untold success story. But its drive for a monopoly of power has swept aside the consensus-building that exemplified Palestinian politics and replaced it with a one-party statelet. Few believe Hamas wants elections anytime soon. Despite the lip service they pay to the electoral process, its leaders are wary of the large part of the Palestinian public that sullenly blames them for prolonging Gaza's troubles.

Without elections there is scant outlet for organized civil dissent. Opponents seeking to hold Gaza's authorities to internal account have few means but force. Hamas claims that it has crushed "the deviants," but in doing so it has deployed the same mosque-storming tactics Fatah once used against it, arousing scorn over its methods. In the absence of a more inclusive approach, Hamas's greatest achievement—the restoration of Gaza's stability—sometimes feels as bittersweet a prize to ordinary Palestinians as the "victory" it claims over the Zionist enemy.

2.

In a sense, Hamas has become captive to its own success as it struggles now to reconcile the pressing needs of day-to-day governance with the ideology it preached in opposition, and to reconcile as well its Palestinian cause with its wider Islamic one, and its cult of guns and martyrdom with more pragmatic instincts. As several useful new books on Hamas reveal, such gnawing internal tensions are inherent in the approach that Islamists have adopted to the question of Palestine from its very origins. Seeing the "cause" in millennial terms, as part of a universal struggle, the faith-based movement has badly damaged a polity that was fragile and inchoate before the implantation of Israel, and has struggled mightily to remain unified ever since.

Although Hamas itself is not yet a quarter-century old, it is important to recall that the earliest armed resistance to Zionist colonization was not nationalist, but rather pan-Islamist in inspiration. In his gossip- and fact-packed book Inside Hamas, Zaki Chehab, a pro-Fatah Palestinian journalist, reminds us that the namesake of Hamas's Qassam Brigades was, in fact, a Syrian who was educated at Cairo's al-Azhar University. When France occupied Syria in 1920, Ezzedine Qassam briefly led an armed cell, but soon fled to the safety of British-occupied Palestine. As a mosque preacher in Haifa he witnessed the surge in Jewish immigration that followed Hitler's rise, and began a clandestine campaign to arm Muslim fighters.

Qassam himself was "martyred" by British troops in 1935, at the start of the Palestine Revolt, and then largely forgotten until his memory was revived by Hamas. The uprising he helped inspire was eventually crushed by the British, who in the process effectively decapitated the Palestinians' nascent leadership. This weakness, compounded by class tensions within Palestinian society, as well as by the marginalizing of its Druze and Christian minorities, proved fatal ten years later, when the better-led, better-equipped, and desperately determined Jewish Yishuv conquered most of historic Palestine.

The 1948 Nakba, or Calamity, left the Palestinians, still leaderless and now physically dispersed, particularly susceptible to Islamist ideas, and to the romantic notion of guerrilla action. Not only had secular Arab armies proved incapable of defending them, but the success of the Jewish state seemed to present an object lesson in the potential of religion as a political force. The displacement of thousands of Palestinian peasants to refugee camps, meanwhile, created conditions of dislocation, squalor, and unemployment similar to those that were to fan Islamist trends in urban slums across the region.

Not surprisingly, much of the future generation of Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, entered politics as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fiercely anti-imperialist, pan-Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928. Even before 1948, according to Jeroen Gunning, a British academic whose Hamas in Politics is an exemplary political primer on the Islamist party's evolution, structure, and thought, the Brotherhood was said to have thirty-eight branches in Palestine, with ten thousand members. Ironically, Arafat's founding of Fatah, the secular party that dominated Palestinian politics until the 1990s, was prompted not by a rejection of Islamist ideas but by the Brotherhood's move, under intense and frequently brutal pressure from Arab regimes, to abandon "armed struggle" in the 1950s.

A generation later, the resurgence of Islamism among Palestinians very much paralleled its rise across the wider Muslim world. A first generation of degree holders, many of them engineers and doctors, were radicalized not just by Israel's occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, but also by the limited room for advancement within Palestinian society. Blaming the Arabs' cosmopolitan elite for their series of defeats, the Islamists sensed their own entitlement to power, both as more authentic representatives of the masses and as the true heirs to a tradition of resistance that they saw as being cultural as much as political.

Paul McGeough, an Australian reporter who has written a fascinating account of the rise of Khaled Meshaal, Hamas's most prominent leader today and the chief of its politburo, quotes him as scoffing at his rivals with the words, "We're the root; Fatah is a mere branch." Even at university in Kuwait in the 1970s, where his mosque-preacher father settled after fleeing his West Bank village in 1967, Meshaal refused to join the existing, Fatah-dominated Palestinian students' union, but insisted on creating a parallel Islamic one. Under his guidance Hamas later refused to join the PLO, the umbrella grouping of Palestinian parties. Hamas also refused to coordinate with others during the 1987–1992 intifada, and refused to participate in national elections before 2005. To the frustration of others it saw itself alone as the Palestinians' rightful leader.

When the Palestinian mainstream moved, during the 1980s, toward compromise with Israel, Islamist factions shifted into outright opposition. While the Muslim Brotherhood had retained a network inside Palestine, based in mosques and student clubs, Khaled Meshaal and a group of younger Islamists in the diaspora had formed a network of their own, collecting funds from Palestinian workers in the wealthy Gulf states. Their dual effort merged in the creation of Hamas. By the time Yasser Arafat signed the first peace deal with the Israeli enemy in 1993, establishing a proto-state under his rule in Gaza and the West Bank, the new party had the means and determination not merely to challenge his course, but to sabotage the entire "peace process."

Its effort, pursued mainly by means of a bloody series of bombings targeting Israeli civilians beginning in 1994, brought Hamas global notoriety but not, at first, much popularity among its own people. For most of that decade, Jeroen Gunning writes, opinion polls rarely showed the Islamists gaining more than 20 percent approval, a level that broadly reflected the performance of similar Islamist parties in other countries. Hamas's slow ascent to victory in the 2006 election came largely as a result of bungling by all of its adversaries.

Indeed, Israel's mishandling of Hamas began even before the group's creation. The Israelis turned a blind eye to recruitment by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s, largely because they saw the Islamists as a foil to nationalist groups. Belatedly alerted to the arming of Hamas cells during the first intifada, Israel increased its appeal by televising the trial of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound Gaza preacher who was Hamas's spiritual head, and then by exiling hundreds of Hamas activists to Lebanon, where they had a useful chance to make contact with fellow Islamists such as Hezbollah.

Hamas's subsequent resort to hideous "martyrdom operations," as suicide bombings were called, owed much to Hezbollah's inspiration and perhaps also to its technical expertise. Israel's response of targeted assassinations hugely bolstered Palestinian sympathy for Hamas, even as it served to radicalize its followers. As Paul McGeough's book makes abundantly clear, for instance, Khaled Meshaal, a relative hard-liner, rode to dominance within Hamas on the wave of outrage that followed Israel's botched attempt to poison him in Amman in 1997. By contrast, when in 2003 Israel succeeded in murdering Ismail Abu Shanab, a respected Gazan intellectual with an engineering degree from Colorado State University, it eliminated a Hamas official who had argued passionately against suicide bombings and in favor of a long-term truce.

Israel's dramatic acceleration of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories during the 1990s, and its systematic undermining of the Palestinian economy by means of roadblocks and closures, convinced many Palestinians that Hamas was perhaps correct in judging the peace process a sham. Even as Yasser Arafat's credit waned among his own people, both Israel and the Clinton administration pushed him to crack down on Hamas. This he did, with some brutality and considerable success, in a campaign that put hundreds of Hamas activists into Palestinian prisons. Yet rather than being rewarded for risking the anger of his own people, Arafat was simply pressured to do more, and told that he would be held to account for any atrocity carried out by Hamas.

In effect if not in intention, Israel handed the Islamists veto power over the peace process. It also so weakened Arafat that when Israel floated the possibility of an offer at Camp David in 2000, the Palestinian leader shied from pursuing it, largely because he feared he could not swing his people to support it. When, in the autumn of 2000, the second intifada broke out in the wake of this failure, Arafat felt obliged to ride the violence rather than attempt to contain it, and soon lost control of his movement as local Fatah activists strove to outdo Hamas in fury.

Arafat was hardly a mere victim. His Fatah party proved just as helpful to Hamas as their mutual enemy. Not only did his suppression of the group smack to many Palestinians of treachery but Arafat's cronies were notoriously corrupt and incompetent. Their handling of the 2006 legislative elections that swept Hamas to power, brilliantly described by Gunning, was almost farcically self-destructive. As Zaki Chehab quotes a Gazan voter telling him at the time, "We don't believe in Hamas's political views, but we want to show the Fatah leadership that we have alternatives."

Yet Hamas may also claim much credit for its success. In stark contrast to Fatah, it has acted with strategic vision, careful planning, and steely discipline. Much of its leadership has deeper local roots, and is generally of a higher caliber: in the cabinet it formed after the 2006 election, no fewer than seven of its twenty-four ministers held advanced degrees from American universities. Politicians such as Meshaal are far more charismatic on television than Arafat's hapless successor, Mahmoud Abbas.

With its clandestine structure of local cells and a dispersed leadership that operates by consensus, Hamas has proved extremely resilient to attack. Despite the bloodiness and apparent futility of its methods in combating Israel, it has shown both a high degree of managerial competence and a responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion that can be surprising for a religiously inspired organization. Yet the need to placate its ideological core, combined with Hamas's evolution of a structure that links Meshaal and his money, safely offshore, directly to Qassam commanders, so bypassing political scrutiny by their less strident colleagues, also builds in rigidity on key issues, most obviously that of peace. Sadly, Hamas's inflexibility has often proved, in the eyes of its constituents, to have been vindicated by events.

Hamas is unlikely to be budged anytime soon from its Gaza stronghold. It is playing a waiting game, hoping that other forces will blink before it does: that the international community will feel shamed into relieving the siege of Gaza, or that Egypt's hostile regime will fall, or that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel will prove so stingy in its dealings with Mahmoud Abbas that the Fatah government on the West Bank will collapse. But in the meantime Hamas is under pressure to deliver something more than bravado to its people. Perhaps, as Gunning suggests, it will one day admit that its armed struggle against Israel (unlike against its internal rivals) has been largely symbolic, and that its declaration of a divine right to Palestine represents more of a credo than a political program. Gunning declines to judge whether, with regard to hopes for Middle Eastern peace, Hamas is what political science would term an "absolute spoiler," or only a limited one. But as he says, politics is never static, nor are political organizations.

—Gaza and Cairo, October 6, 2009

Open Letter to Syrian President Assad: Shake Hands with Olmert and Greet Him with "Shalom"

Let us hope that President Al-Assad is reading the newspapers these days, or at least that his advisors are. A peace with Syria is an essential ingredient to a comprehensive Middle East peace, and if Assad can see that it's worth his country's while to get back with the Turkeys and USs of the world and get away from the hardline Iranians, the better off the world at large will be.

Randy Shiner

In an open letter posted July 8, 2008 on the liberal Arab e-journal Elaph, the prominent liberal Arab intellectual Lafif Lakhdar urges Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to cut his ties with Iran, embrace domestic reforms, and follow in the footsteps of Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat in making peace with Israel. Following are excerpts:( 1)

Turkey and France Have Opened the Door to Peace with Israel For You

"To the Honorable President of the Syrian Republic: "The prime minister of Turkey's Islamic government, Mr. Tayyip Recep Erdogan, has opened the door to peace with Israel for you. And the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, has tried ever since his election, and is continuing to try, with difficulty, to open another door to extract Syria from the regional and international isolation into which [your] poor diplomatic decision-making has brought it.

"[This poor decision-making has ranged] from encouraging the infiltration of terrorists into Iraq to prevent its rebuilding to drowning Lebanon in problems and blood, and en route obstructing [the creation of] Palestinian national unity among Hamas, Fatah and all the Palestinian factions, under one authority and one military command - which is a prerequisite for increasing the possibility of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the emergence of a Palestinian state - this state that everyone has heard about but no one has seen. It is a known fact that no national liberation movement that is divided against itself has ever achieved its objective. "

Obstructing the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not merely a tactic to get the Golan back, but has a strategic component as well. [Syrian] president Hafiz Al-Assad's 1973 speech still rings like a slap to my ears: 'There is no Palestine,' he said; 'Palestine is southern Syria.' "I once said to Mr. Nabil Sha'ath, at the Center for Palestine Studies... 'Palestine is trapped between the mandibles of Greater Israel and Greater Syria... may Allah come to your aid.' "In order not to slam shut the two doors of hope that have opened before you, you must sincerely and responsibly manage to confront four great challenges: 1) correcting the error of [your] strategic alliance with Iran; 2) [arriving at] a final abandonment of [your] attempt to regain control of Lebanon; 3) regaining the Golan; and 4) [achieving] domestic reconciliation."

Your "Greatest Error... Was the Strategic Alliance with Iran's Inflammatory Extreme Right-Wing Religious Government"

Mr. President: The crux of politics today is for the politician to understand exactly in what world we live. We live in a world that changes at the speed of light, and in which the dangers are increasing. The true politician is one who tries to adapt to this world as it is, not as he would like it to be.

"Therefore, perhaps the greatest error in [your] diplomatic decision-making was the strategic alliance with Iran's inflammatory extreme right-wing religious government.

"The contemporary international diplomatic lexicon recognizes only the government of the center: center-right and center-left, alternating peacefully in government. Other governments are shunned and have no future. "...This alliance was accomplished with the Islamic Republic of Iran's most delirious and isolated government, domestically and abroad, to the point that one does not know whether to laugh or cry at [Iranian] President Ahmadinejad's hallucinations of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, who from this time forth, according to the Iranian president, formulates 'Iran's domestic and foreign policies.'

"The funny thing is that the Majlis ([Iran's] parliament) debates in all seriousness on hallucinations like these. One ayatollah said: 'Far be it from the Hidden Imam that a policy leading to 20% inflation be set!'

"Former French foreign minister Doust-Blasy records in his memoirs that he and the German foreign minister could not believe their ears when President Ahmadinejad told them, at a private meeting in New York, that 'the world is in need of chaos.' He did not add, of course, that the chaos is a sign of the return of the Hidden Imam, who will achieve a 'divine victory' over the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran!

"The alliance of Syria - militarily weak and in a state of economic collapse - and Iran is like one drowning man calling on another drowning man for help. Unless the moderate Iranian elite get rid of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Al-Quds Brigades government, and their policies of aggression, Iran may one day find itself standing alone in a fateful confrontation with the world. And Syria may thus find itself in the same dark tunnel as its ally Iran.

"The Syria-Iran alliance is not a matter of predestination. Syria can find a preferred alternative in the Gulf petrodollars and in the investments of international companies that were, and continue to be, capable of development in Southeast Asia, India and China.

"It seems that Syria intends to emulate Iran in the matter of nuclear weaponry, which your father, president Hafiz Al-Assad, with his far-reaching vision, rejected - aware that [this weaponry] is not usable in the closely adjacent countries of the Middle East, except in the event of collective suicide... This is an extreme case - the case of existential threat - in which Syria is very unlikely one day to find itself.

"Mr. President: The Syrian-Iranian alliance entails [a Syrian] alliance with Hizbullah, the most extreme and delirious of Iranian parties in Lebanon in matters of military decision-making and achieving 'divine victory' - with the blessings of the Hidden Imam.

"You can now transform this disadvantage into an advantage. Particularly if a government formed from the alliance of Mohammad Khatami's reformists and 'Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani's moderate conservatives replaces Ahmadinejad's government in Iran, [this alliance] can help disarm Hizbullah, whose weapons hinder the Lebanese government from [exercising a] monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This would transform [Hizbullah] into a political party with no claim to controlling Lebanon by force of arms.

"Such a wise decision would require you to convince some in Damascus to put out of their minds the idea of Lebanon as a 'milk cow' - and, beyond that, to encourage them to get used to full recognition of the state of Lebanon, and to draw international Syrian-Lebanese boundaries, and to [establish] mutual diplomatic relations.

And, finally, to put to an end, once and for all, to the chain of assassinations of Lebanese presidents, leaders, intellectuals, and journalists that has been going on since the 1970s. "Such courageous decisions as these are sufficient for Syria to escape its regional and international isolation, and perhaps to find a Lockerbie-type solution to the international tribunal [for the Al-Hariri assassination] that is such a nightmare for your regime."

"You Will... Not Regain the Golan by Waging a Proxy War Via Hizbullah or Hamas" or Via a Syria-Israel War

"Mr. President: You will in all probability not regain the Golan by waging a proxy war via Hizbullah or Hamas, and you are even less likely to do so via a Syria-Israel war, whose only certain outcome would be the overthrow of your regime.

"A realistic regional and international policy may - rather, will - regain it. The means of salvation are before you - mediation between you and [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert, by the Islamic leader of Turkey, Erdogan. Try to transform him from mediator to arbitrator in direct negotiations between the two of you. His friendship with both Syria and Israel qualify him for this task.

"Erdogan, who strives for stability and peace in the Middle East, is a better option for you than Ahmadinejad, who advocates jihad and martyrdom and threatens the region with nuclear convulsions.

"The policy of [the late Egyptian president Anwar Al-]Sadat, of 'breaking down the psychological barrier' between Egypt and Israel, could be a good example for you on the same path leading to Syrian-Israeli reconciliation. The landing of the Egyptian president at Ben Gurion Airport had global media reverberations [as great] as if he had landed on the surface of Mars. [Moshe] Dayan confessed to him during the Camp David negotiations, 'You, sir, are more popular than all of us in Israel.'

"In this way he regained the Sinai, and lightened the burden of arms buildup that had bled the Egyptian economy - as is the case with the Syrian economy today. Try to be the Sadat of Syria - attaching no importance to the taboos that forbid communication with and greeting the enemy, inherited from the customs and religions of primitive tribes and totemism, which were haunted by obsessionive neurosis. Also, initiating peace with the Jews and Christians is proscribed and criminalized by the Islamic jurisprudence of al-wala' wa'l-bara' [the doctrine that Muslims may only associate with and have allegiance and loyalty toward other Muslims].

"Your refusal to shake hands with Olmert, even though both of you were sitting at the same table, is a primitive vestige of this obsessive neurosis. Modernity has established, upon the ruins of these ossified taboos, the principles, laws, and customs of civilized, flexible, and humane behavior that regulate protocol relations among officials - and they do not proscribe an offer on your part to shake hands with Ehud Olmert.

"But the recovery of the Golan will require even more than a handshake. It requires you to say 'Shalom' to him with enthusiasm, and it may be that he will answer... with the same greeting or better, saying 'Salaam.'

"Such an affecting, human scene would be broadcast by the media to every home in the world, and would give you symbolic capital, of which you are in direst need, and perhaps will motivate some of the Israelis who would have voted 'No' on returning the Golan to change their minds.

"There is no place for sticking to insignificant formalities when the signing of a lasting peace is at stake - with all that it symbolizes and all that it promises of peaceful coexistence and cooperation in all fields...

"It is inappropriate that strategic thinking exhaust itself with obsessive formalities. Rather, it must address the basic issues directly, for the day after peace is signed: cooperation on economic, water resource, technological, scientific, petroleum and gas, cultural, and especially educational issues.

"Israel's curricula and teaching methods, and the competence of its teachers, are among the best in the world, whereas education in most of the Arab countries, including Syria, is poor and sterile. Throughout 5,000 years of history, the Middle East has known only wars, interrupted by brief periods of peace that coincided with brief periods of economic prosperity.

"New applied technologies can make economic prosperity permanent, and they can make peace permanent as well - as in the case of the European Union, among its modern, secular, and democratic countries...

Domestic Reform: "Begin by Freeing the Prisoners of Opinion"

"Mr. President: Let us imagine that all of the relevant sides play out their roles in this optimistic scenario perfectly. No doubt you will ask yourself: What good will it do me to gain the world and lose my people?

"One who formulates a realistic foreign policy would do well to complement it with a domestic policy that is no less realistic, with which you can remind your people, who fear raids by the security agencies, of the salad days of the Damascus Spring.

"Begin by freeing the prisoners of opinion, and even the Islamists whose hands are not stained with blood - and don't forget the members of the Damascus Declaration, who have committed no crime except calling for 'the normalization of Syrian-Lebanese relations' - something something that the writer of these lines also demands.

"Let the Kurds exercise their cultural rights freely, and speak, sing, and write in their language. Recognize their full citizenship and nationality under the International Convention for the Protection of Minority Rights.

"Extend compensation to the families of the 17,000 Islamists who have 'disappeared' since the 1970s. Likewise, compensate the families of the Lebanese and Palestinians who met the same fate.

"And this is really astonishing: How does Syrian law pardon or allow for mitigating circumstances to the perpetrators of 'honor crimes' - [a practice] which the Prophet of Islam outlawed and nullified in the third year of the hijra, in surah 24 of the Koran - while at the same time ratcheting up the punishment for democratic intellectuals and defenders of human rights?"
Endnote:(1) www.elaph.com, July 8, 2008.

If Not Peace Now, What?

View from the Booth: This is some scary stuff to contemplate, mired as we are in the US with an economic situation that, from all accounts is not likely to improve any time soon, making international instability that much more worrisome to the American public. We are seeing, together with the cost of gasoline rising, a concomitant rise in expressions of anger and resentment toward Israel as being the bane of our existence. Canaries in a coal mine? Of course. Hopefully there is some way out of the mess we find ourselves in. I worry when someone like Judea Pearl says "watch out".

Randy Shiner

Powered by
July/August 2008

If Not Peace Now, What?

Many Israelis, perhaps even a majority according to some polls, believe that the time has come for Israel to follow the 2003 Road Map to create two states—one Jewish, the other Palestinian. Yet, others in Israel and in the diaspora caution that the pursuit of peace at this time is hopeless, foolhardy, even dangerous. In the belief that it is important to hear voices from all sides of the debate, Moment posed the following question to a spectrum of such critics: “If the peace process does not or cannot work, what do you envision happening in Israel over the next decade?” Judea Pearl, Meyrav Wurmser, Benny Morris, Morton Klein, Shlomo Riskin, Daniel Gordis, Daniel Pipes, Shoshana Bryen and Steven Emerson offer us an honest look at their fears and hopes for Israel’s future.—Eileen Lavine


Judea Pearl President, Daniel Pearl Foundation Los Angeles, CA

We are witnessing a frantic race between Iran's nuclear capability and the acceptance of coexistence as a feasible and desirable reality by Israelis and Palestinians. While Israel has internalized coexistence as a national goal, it is physically unable to accommodate a sovereign neighbor, rocket-range away from its vital airports, whose youngsters openly swear to destroy it. Palestinians, on their part, are not in a hurry to abandon their national goal of Greater Palestine when Iran promises to deliver one soon, and Western media ennobles it with the title, “one-state solution.”

If Iran wins this race, a bloody war is imminent, commencing with 800 missiles per day on Haifa and Tel Aviv from emboldened Syria and Hezbollah. Israel will have to take defensive action, perhaps preemptive, perhaps even nuclear, and a sizable chunk of the world is likely to go up in flames, together, of course, with the Palestinian dream of independence. The only disaster-averting move I can envision today, albeit a utopian one, is an urgent all-out pro-coexistence educational campaign, a meaningful one this time around, ushered in by a bold, joint proclamation from the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, political as well as intellectual, recognizing the historical right of each side to a viable, equally legitimate and equally indigenous state. The key to success is honesty, and the key to honesty is the word historical—dreams become a reality when deemed “historically just.” And the Iranian bomb is ticking.


Meyrav Wurmser Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Hudson Institute Washington, D.C.

The Jordanian option—seeking to resolve the Palestinian problem through a federation or confederation with Jordan—is the most viable genuine answer. It is a question of time. On one side, Israel cannot continue to live with the Palestinian problem. On the other, Jordan fears that the Palestinian state will destroy it. In private, Jordanian officials maintain that Jordan would be better off controlling the problem by taking over the West Bank instead of being destroyed itself. Thus, it is logical that within a few years, Israel will need to turn the clock back to before 1994, and come to terms with Jordan on how to resolve this problem between them.

That leaves Gaza as an outstanding problem. As Egypt enters an unstable phase of succession, it cannot afford to have Hamas hook up with its own Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps a temporary ceasefire, or at least some understanding on border control between Egypt and Hamas would help Egypt (to Israel’s detriment), but how long would it last? Israeli officials know Hamas wants to re-arm and continue to serve as an agent of Iran, which seeks to use the organization to advance its own dangerous regional ambitions.

In the meantime, Iran and Syria are setting up a new line of confrontation and challenge for Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the West. We are at a critical juncture. Iran and Syria have become not only an Israeli problem, but also a problem for Israel’s neighbors who, like Israel, may have to look to Jordan for answers.



Benny Morris Author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War Li-On, Israel

The Israeli future will see more of the same because the Palestinians are not ready for peace: Palestinian terrorism, Israeli counterstrikes, perhaps larger operations with larger rockets.

The Iranian situation will explode in the next year, and it will overshadow the Palestinian problem. Iran is working to produce nuclear weapons and will have them within two or three years. My assumption is that Israel and the United States will have to take military action to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons because economic and military sanctions will not work. This will lead to more problems throughout the Middle East, perhaps even including missiles launched between Iran and Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah will do Iran’s bidding to attack Israel. The Palestinian problem will continue as an existential problem, but it will be on the back burner.


Morton Klein National President, Zionist Organization of America New York, NY

There can be no hope of ending the Arab war against Israel unless there is a transformation of the Arab/Muslim culture that promotes hatred and violence against Israel in their schools, media, sermons, speeches and children’s camps. The Palestinian Authority must also begin to arrest terrorists, outlaw terrorist groups and stop glorifying terrorists. They must begin to show Israel on their maps, eliminate their derogatory posters about Israel, and abrogate the clauses of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ ruling Fatah party’s charter opposing a political solution and calling for Israel’s destruction.

Until these transformations occur, there will be no real movement toward a Palestinian state. Most nations realize that under the present circumstances, such a state would evolve into a terrorist state, increasing its ability to promote the troubling agenda of its underlying culture. Remember, Syria, Iran, and North Korea have sovereign states but do not promote peace.

I believe the United States will eventually end the $500 million in aid to and negotiations with the Palestinian Authority unless and until they make these critical changes. If these changes do not occur and terrorism continues, Israel will have no choice but to end all negotiations and launch extensive military operations against the Palestinian Arab terrorists and their cells in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

Such Israeli anti-terror operations, the end of U.S. aid and the end of fruitless negotiations will finally make it clear to the Palestinians that terrorism and a hard-line Arab approach will gain them nothing, and that Israel is here to stay. Then, there could be movement toward a genuine conciliation.


Shlomo Riskin Founder and Chief Rabbi of the City of Efrat Gush Etzion, Israel

The real challenge is to find a peace partner. I truly believe that if there is no Palestinian leader who is willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and make compromises, we must seek another partner. One possibility is Jordan, which will either establish a consortium with the Palestinians or will be in a position to broker peace with Israel. This is not only in the interest of Israel and the Palestinians but also of Jordan. Jordan has the most to lose if a Hamas Palestinian state of extremist Islam fundamentalists is established.

What has to be remembered is that there is not simply a war between Israel and the Palestinians; there is a world war between fundamentalist Islam and all moderate freedom-loving people. I would like to believe that slowly the world will wake up to the danger of Iran and Islamic fundamentalists and that a compromise will be brought to the fore to enable Palestinians to live independently, either with a free government ready to recognize Israel or as part of a consortium with Jordan.


Daniel Gordis, Senior vice president, Shalem Center, Jerusalem, Israel

Now that many Israelis believe (perhaps correctly) that there is simply no peace to be had, that what is at stake is not borders—or Palestinian statehood—but the very right of the Jewish state to be, how shall we proceed? What sort of education system do we need to respond to that challenge? How does one raise a generation of children who no longer believe they'll live to see peace without getting them to hate the "other" as deeply as our enemies do? Can we produce young men and women so passionately Zionist that they would risk everything for this country in their youth and live their adult lives here, while remaining sufficiently open to the possibility of peace that, were it to become possible one day, they would not squander the opportunity?

Can a young generation robbed of the possibility of peace grow into sophisticated adulthood without serious discussions of the legitimacy of the use of power? There is, to be sure, a moral obligation not to use excessive power, but might there also be a moral imperative not to spurn its use?


Daniel PipesDirector, Middle East ForumPhiladelphia, PA

Unfortunately, the majority of Palestinians, perhaps 80 percent, still wish to eliminate Israel. Israel faces an unprecedented barrage of assaults—weapons of mass destruction, conventional forces, rockets, terrorists, internal sabotage, economic boycott and ideological undermining. I would not call the current diplomacy a “peace process;” it’s more of a “war process,” for the situation has greatly deteriorated since the Oslo accords of 1993. The current round of negotiations cannot work because diplomacy does not succeed during wartime. First the war has to be resolved and then negotiations can fruitfully begin. Either the Jewish state is accepted by its neighbors or it is eliminated.

I wish it were possible to finesse this hard fact, but attempts so far have all failed, leading me to the conclusion that further negotiations are a mistake until the Palestinians give up their war goals.&


Shoshana BryenDirector of Special Projects, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)Washington, DC

The “peace process” is an aberration; there is no historical precedent for parties to cede fundamental principles (“right of return,” security, Jerusalem) while they still believe they can “win” the “war.” Machiavelli called peace the conditions imposed by the victor on the loser of the last war. There is no reason the Palestinians and Israel cannot live together, but it will not be achieved by a “process” asking for or demanding nicer behavior.

Israel is entitled to enforcement of U.N. Resolution 242 and the guarantee of its “secure and recognized borders free from threats or acts of force.” This is an obligation of the Arab world—the Palestinians are not signatories to 242. Israel weakens itself through trades with the Palestinians without an agreement with the Arab states.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was right when she said the Arab states have to stop pretending Israel does not exist. It asks too much of the Palestinians to think they can accept the legitimacy of Israel if their Arab sponsors do not; how can Abu Mazen get out in front of Saudi Arabia?

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are beholden to the U.S. for their security, and American efforts should go there. Israel and the U.S. have to find ways to convince them and the Palestinians that they cannot “win” the “war.”



Steven Emerson Executive Director, Investigative Project on TerrorismWashington, DC
I am a realist. I wish I could be more hopeful, but I know that there is no peace process. In 1993, Israel signed a peace treaty with Palestinian authorities titled the Declaration of Principles. Since then Israelis have been in denial because, despite their promises, the Palestinians do not want peace.

The only semblance of a “peace process” is a result of the wall. It should be extended and made hermetic. The problem is that the Palestinians will come up to the wall and launch missiles over it. No one has policed acquisition of weapons in Gaza and the West Bank since 1993.
Israel may withdraw from parts of the West Bank, but this would be a mistake in the absence of real peace with Palestinians. I foresee a low intensity state of war and one major war in the future. I see another intifada and a big response from Israel. Israel cannot tolerate Palestinian missiles forever. What are the alternatives?

ISRAEL'S PECULIAR POSITION

View from the booth: What has changed in 40 years?


ISRAEL'S PECULIAR POSITION By Eric Hoffer (LA Times 5/26/68)

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.

Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June, he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts and Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

*****************

Eric Hoffer was an American (Jewish) longshoreman/social philosopher. Hoffer lived from 1902 until 1983. He wrote nine books, countless columns, and hundreds of essays. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

http://www.nycat.org/

Taking a cue from Israel

View from the booth: Well, well. What have we here? What this discussion portends for the future depends upon the level of sway that moderates in both Fatah and Hamas hold over the types cast amongst Fatah of "eradicateurs" - those within Fatah who think that Israel will invade Gaza, get rid of Hamas and hand the whole thing over to Fatah (and like obverse thinkers among Hamas). It isn't going to happen that way. If Israel invades Gaza, the price to pay for Fatah, Hamas and the rest of the involved Arab world will be quite large and is probably, from an Arab viewpoint, too high a price to pay to Israel to take care of this internal matter. In the end, any stable, reasonably powerful (that is, enough to control its own people without worrying overly so about radical factions) and responsible government with which Israel can negotiate a peace between itself and the Palestinians, is a good thing.

Randy Shiner




Taking a cue from Israel
Fatah's change of tune is better late than never, reports Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Despite continued blame-casting, Hamas and Fatah are getting themselves ready for Arab-mediated reconciliation talks aimed at restoring Palestinian national unity and ending the year-long rift between the two largest political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories.

No concrete date has been designated for the intensive talks, but reliable sources in the Gaza Strip have intimated that Egypt is about to extend the invitations to both Hamas and Fatah for the resumption of the inter-Palestinian dialogue. The sources said the commencement of the talks was only a matter of days or one week at the maximum.

Efforts to end the enduring crisis between Fatah and Hamas acquired a new momentum recently when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced his willingness to restart reconciliation talks with Hamas without any preconditions. Hamas welcomed the announcement, made on 6 June, saying it was willing and ready to sit down with Fatah any time and in any place to end the long-standing rift between the two sides.

Moreover, the recent Egyptian- brokered ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip is having a positive impact on the prospects of restoring Palestinian national unity.

There have been some tangible signs indicating that the thick fog separating Gaza and Ramallah is beginning to dissipate, slowly but surely. Last week, a high-level Fatah delegation headed by former PA minister Hikmat Zeid visited the Gaza Strip and met with Fatah leaders and some low-level Hamas operatives. The delegation was welcomed by the authorities in Gaza and full security escorts were provided to facilitate its meetings and lodgings. And while the delegation didn't meet with the Hamas government Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh or any high-ranking official, the visit itself was viewed as a step in the right direction.

More to the point, the PA security agencies, apparently acting on orders from Abbas, released dozens of suspected Hamas sympathisers from jail. This coincided with a significant reduction in the number of Hamas sympathisers being detained in PA custody.

On Tuesday, a representative of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), which is making its own mediation efforts between Fatah and Hamas, said he had received a list of 54 Hamas detainees in PA jails in the West Bank and 44 Fatah detainees in Hamas custody in the Gaza Strip. The DFLP representative, Talal Abu Afifeh, said he would press both sides to release all political prisoners in the coming days or weeks and turn the page on a shameful episode of Palestinian history under the Israeli occupation. If the DFLP succeeds, it will have removed one of the most contentious problems generating ill-will between Gaza and Ramallah.

Concomitantly, there has been a noticeable de-escalation in the propaganda war between Hamas and Fatah, with the respective media of each side generally refraining from using harsh epithets to describe the other.

Furthermore, there are unconfirmed reports that Abbas will meet with the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Abbas is slated to visit the Syrian capital next month. While the prospective meeting won't necessarily be a breakthrough in itself, it would be the strongest and clearest sign that the ice between the two erstwhile enemies was beginning to melt.

Moreover, PA officials in Ramallah confirmed that Abbas was planning to visit the Gaza Strip. Ahmed Abdul- Rahman, a senior Fatah spokesman, was quoted as saying that, "the visit might take place soon because the president is determined to put an end to the state of division in the Palestinian arena."

According to Hassan Khreishe, an independent lawmaker who heads the Popular Committee for National Reconciliation (PCNC), both Hamas and Fatah as well as a host of Arab mediators including the Arab League, Egypt and Qatar, have already accepted the general outlines of a prospective agreement between the two Palestinian factions.

Khreishe said the PCNC initiative consists of two parts; the first calls for ceasing mutual incitement and releasing all political detainees, followed by the formation of a transitional government made up of technocrats and independents, whose main task would be to prepare for the organisation of early presidential and legislative elections. The second part deals with the "hard files" including reforming and reconstructing the Palestinian political system, the security agencies and the PLO.

It is likely that any prospective agreement between Fatah and Hamas will be based on the National Reconciliation Accord reached between the two sides two years ago. The accord was based on a carefully-worded document prepared by the leaders of Palestinian political and resistance prisoners in Israeli jails. It calls, inter alia, for the creation of a Palestinian state on 100 per cent of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967 with all of East Jerusalem as its capital as well as a just resolution of the refugee plight pursuant to UN Resolution 194. The agreement also called for the rebuilding of the Palestinian security forces on a national rather than factional basis.

The ceasefire agreement in Gaza, however fragile and uncertain it may be, is generally perceived to have enhanced the overall position of Hamas vis-à-vis Fatah. Many within the Fatah camp and its allies, especially the so-called eradicateurs wing, had hoped that Israel would eventually overrun the Gaza Strip, destroy Hamas and hand the coastal territory over to Fatah on a silver platter.

Now, the more pragmatic Fatah leadership, especially elements loyal to imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Al-Barghouti, who advocates national unity with Hamas, seems to be resigned to the fact that Fatah has no choice but to talk to Hamas. The Gaza tahdia (calm) also seems to be changing minds within the erstwhile enemies of Hamas.

A member of the ultra- secular party, Feda, has privately accused the United States and Israel of betraying the Palestinian Authority. "They wanted us to be more American than the Americans by insisting that we boycott and fight Hamas. Well, if Israel could hold talks and reach a ceasefire agreement with it, why should the PLO continue to adopt a hostile attitude towards Hamas. We can't be more Israeli than the Israelis," said the man who asked that his name not be mentioned.

Such disappointment, observers suggest, is likely to be rife among many Fatah and PLO hawks who until recently adopted a gung-ho attitude towards Hamas.

A Surprise Negotiation

A Surprise Negotiation

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, June 25, 2008; A13

What's going on between Syria and Israel? Are the indirect peace negotiations through Turkish mediators that were announced last month for real? I've been talking with sources on all sides, and they present an upbeat view of a peace process that has taken many people (including top Bush administration officials) by surprise.

As with any secret diplomatic initiative, this one is surrounded by mysteries and riddles. So I'll examine the Syria-Israel dialogue as a series of puzzles and offer my best guesses about what's happening:

(1) How did these negotiations begin?

The channel opened in the fall of 2006, just after the summer war in Lebanon that had made both Damascus and Tel Aviv nervous about the destabilizing role of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon. Syria proposed indirect "proximity" talks and insisted on Turkey, a rare friend of both countries, as intermediary.

For many months, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wasn't sure he trusted the channel. The Bush administration was skeptical about whether the process would lead anywhere, but it didn't try to stop it. About a year ago, Olmert decided to test the Syrian track. He had strong encouragement from the Israeli defense establishment -- the defense minister, Ehud Barak; the army chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; and Israeli military intelligence.

(2) What's in it for the two sides?

The Israeli military brass favored engagement with Syria because they didn't think the status quo in the region was sustainable. Lebanon had become a surrogate battleground between Israel and Iran, and the Israelis arguably had lost the first round. Meanwhile, the Syrians were increasing their arsenal of missiles and other weapons. The judgment in Tel Aviv was that Israel stood to lose strategically by letting things continue as they were.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad favored an opening to Israel to counter attempts by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia to isolate his country. Syrian confidence in the Turkish negotiating channel increased after Israel indicated informally that it was prepared to accept terms for return of the Golan Heights (and related issues, such as water rights) that had been reached in direct Syrian-Israeli negotiations during the 1990s.

(3) Can Syria be decoupled from Iran?

Israel's overriding goal has been to draw Syria away from its alliance with Iran. So far, the
Israelis see no sign that the peace talks have achieved this goal. Syria-watchers caution that this sort of decisive transfer of loyalties is unlikely. But eventually, Syria may move away from Iran (and toward Turkey) because the Baath regime in Damascus is secular to its core -- and mistrusts the religious fervor of the mullahs. The decoupling would be cultural and political, rather than a matter of security policy.

(4) Who assassinated Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in February?

The car bomb that killed Iran's key covert operative in Hezbollah is still echoing in the Middle East. Suspicion immediately focused on Israel. But on Feb. 27, a London-based newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi, with very good sources in Damascus, alleged that several Arab nations had conspired with Mossad to assassinate Mughniyah.

Adding to the speculation are reports that shortly before his death, Mughniyah was attempting to heal a split within Hezbollah between the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its former leader, Subhi Tufaily. Tufaily's power base is the Bekaa Valley, which has lost influence in Hezbollah to Shiites from southern Lebanon. According to one Arab source, Mughniyah -- traveling under his longtime pseudonym, "Haj Ismail" -- paid a visit shortly before his death to Tufaily's village of Britel, just south of Baalbek.

Mughniyah usually traveled without bodyguards, believing that his protection was the surgical alteration of his features, which prevented even old friends from recognizing "Haj Ismail." For that reason, the Syrians insisted they weren't at fault. But a sign of tension was Tehran's announcement that a joint commission would investigate the killing, a statement that Damascus promptly denied.

(5) What about Syria's secret nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by the Israelis on Sept. 6, 2007?

Oddly enough, that attack on what CIA analysts called the "Enigma Building" may have helped the peace talks. The Israelis felt that their decisive action helped restore the credibility of their deterrence policy. The Syrians appreciated that Israeli and American silence allowed them time to cover their tracks. Finally, the fact that Assad kept the nuclear effort a secret, and that he managed the post-attack pressures, showed Israelis that he was truly master of his own house, and thus a plausible negotiating partner.
The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

HOPE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: Why Hamas Needs Its Cease-Fire with Israel

From the booth: consider that this piece was written by a Swiss reporter for a German newspaper. It takes the writer almost half the article to mention rockets on top of civilians in Israel and never mentions that the Hamas terrorists hide behind civilians and launch their terror attacks from within populated areas. The conclusions, however, are hopeful; I'm not holding my breath.

Randy Shiner.

HOPE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Why Hamas Needs Its Cease-Fire with Israel
By Pierre Heumann in Tel Aviv

Hamas and Israeli negotiators have agreed to a cease-fire that could ring in a new era. Instead of fighting, they want to lay down their weapons.


Getty Images
A female Hamas fighter: Hope for a cease-fire

It is now official: The cease-fire between Hamas and the Israelis will begin on Thursday, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev confirmed on Wednesday morning in Jerusalem. The deal, brokered by Egypt in Cairo, will bring to an end more than a year of fighting between the Palestinian extremist group and the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip -- a conflict which has cost the lives of more than 400 Palestinians and seven Israelis. Should the agreement manage to bring the fighting to a stop, Israel could lift the blockade of the Gaza Strip as early as next week.

It is a moment the 1.4 million Gaza Strip residents have long been waiting for. For months, Palestinians there have been faced with empty store shelves and widespread shortages of everything from fuel to food. It will also mean an end to Israeli bombing runs and military activities in the densely populated region. Israelis, meanwhile, are hoping the deal will stop the steady stream of homemade rockets fired across the border -- though on Tuesday evening, after the deal was announced, yet more rockets sailed into Israel.


REPRINTS
Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article in your publication. The negotiations have been underway for months. Finally, though, the Egyptian middlemen were able to find common ground between the two sides. It is an impressive success which saw Hamas move a long way from its original list of demands. In the beginning, for example, the extremist Islamist group wanted the cease-fire to also extend to the West Bank. There, moderate Palestinians with the Fatah movement under Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are in power -- and Israel has a free hand to hunt down Hamas terror cells. Securing the right to continue such searches was vital to the Israelis. The two sides agreed to leave the issue of the West Bank for future negotiations.

A Hamas Climb-Down

The climb-down on the part of Hamas shows that they are dependent on a cease-fire. Israel has sharply cut supplies to the Gaza Strip in reaction to the rockets which are regularly fired at the south of Israel from the Hamas-controlled territory. As a result, the 1.6 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are currently experiencing one of the territory's worst-ever crises. The harsh Israeli economic sanctions have now brought Hamas to their knees. In accordance with the international boycott which has been in effect since Hamas seized power one year ago, Israel only allows the Gaza Strip to receive just enough fuel, food, construction material and medicine that is necessary for people to survive -- but not enough, however, to make modern life possible.


DER SPIEGEL
Graphic: The Palestinian Territories at a glance (click to enlarge).

The Israeli government had been hoping that protests on the part of the Palestinian population against their catastrophic living conditions would be enough to bring about regime change -- in other words, to bring Hamas down. It's true that these hopes have not been fulfilled. But within the population there have been signs of resistance against the policies of Hamas which are bringing the Gaza Strip into ruin. According to Palestinian political scientist Mkhaimar Abu Sada from Al-Azhar University in the Gaza Strip, Hamas is using the crisis to win political capital for itself and to drive citizens to acts of desperation against Israel. "Hamas is putting the blame for the misery on Israel," he says. "But fewer and fewer Palestinians are convinced that that is the case."

A Statesman-Like Hamas?

After a year of being in control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas is now showing its statesman-like side. Hamas strategists hope that improving supplies to the territory will help to strengthen the Islamist group's standing among Palestinians -- which would then lead to a further consolidation of their position in the Gaza Strip. In the process, they want to resolve the internal split among Palestinians in their favor.

But it is precisely in this point that Hamas has to prove that it can push through its policies and that it is willing to use force against its Palestinian allies. It will soon become clear if Hamas will act to stop the various militant splinter groups in the Gaza Strip from breaking the cease-fire. That is set to be a difficult test. Some radical groups have already announced that Hamas' agreement to a cease-fire does not apply to them.

The stakes for Hamas are considerable. In the coming weeks, it will seek to push its agenda forward -- and not just on the militarily front, but most of all in terms of its political and social goals. One of its key aims is the Islamization of Palestinian society in Gaza.

Hamas won't have much time to do so, though, because Israel will be unwilling to accept any disruptions to the cease-fire, according to sources in the Defense Ministry. From Jerusalem's perspective, it is Hamas' responsibility to put an end to the rocket attacks. Israeli politicians and military officers are extremely skeptical that the cease-fire can hold.


Despite the lack of enthusiasm in Jerusalem, the Israelis have accepted the cease-fire. After all, a rejection of the "gentlemen's agreement" would have been a slap in the face for the Egyptian government, whose chief negotiators have served for months as middlemen between Israel and Hamas.

Israel also wants to prove that all the diplomatic options have been exhausted before it commences planned military operations in the Gaza Strip. Those operations are intended to put an end to the hail of rockets from within the Hamas-controlled territory -- assuming, of course, that the cease-fire does not hold.

Pierre Heumann is the Middle East correspondent for the Swiss newsweekly Weltwoche.

Mere hours after becoming Israel's new ‘best friend’ Obama backtracks on status of Jerusalem

In the spirit of pretending to be balanced about Barack Obama, I present the below article, brought to my attention this morning by a thoughtful patron of the Corner Deli whose suspicions of Mr. Obama and, undoubtedly of all politicians, runs quite deep.

Like I've said in the past, it's going to be Israel that takes care of Israel. If Jerusalem is on the table, it will be because Israel wants it to be, not because Obama or any American is going to force it. But these are nuances that would not have played well to that audience. He should have said nothing about settlements and nothing about Jerusalem, and left it with the general notion that Israel will have US support for whatever the parties want to do. I agree that this does not look good -- on first blush, it isn't. But I am curious: who vetted that speech? It was distributed widely for publication. But the big and realistic picture isn't that bad. And let us not lose the forest for the trees. The bottom line is that nobody is going to force Israel to do anything. Obama's Israel adviser is the former Ambassador to Israel who we have to presume knows the realities of what is and is not likely to happen in reality.

Regardless of this, the old way of doing business is not working and the discussion has to change. If Bush would have adopted a different approach and not forced elections with a terrorist group on the ballot, there's no doubt that Hamas would not be in control of the Gaza Strip. He forced Israel to do things that it didn't want to do, and the weak Israeli government acceded to it. I think that there would be a different response today from Israel given its experience with Gaza and the US' descendancy of its own power in the region.

Randy Shiner





Mere hours after becoming Israel's new ‘best friend’ Obama backtracks on status of Jerusalem

By Binyamin L. Jolkovsky






Original 'misunderstood' statements contradicted campaign policy


www.JewishWorldReview.com | Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Barak Obama stood before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee parley Wednesday morning and declared his complete, unqualified support for a Jewish Jerusalem. The Holy City, he said, "will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."


The move was an attempt to score points with many in the Jewish and evangelical communities who, given Obama's past political relationships with terrorist sympathizers, racists, and other undesirables, have been weary of how, as president, he would treat the Jewish State.


The rousing applause from the audience, including some of the most powerful politicians in America, was immediate.


Almost as immediate, though, was Hamas' condemnation. Leaders of the terrorist group had previously endorsed Obama as their choice for America's Commander in Chief.


Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said he "totally rejected" Obama's Jerusalem pronouncement.


"The whole world knows that holy Jerusalem was occupied in 1967 and we will not accept a Palestinian state without having Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state," he added.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

To read Obama's speech in its entirety, please click HERE.


What a difference a day makes.


On Thursday, when queried by CNN, Obama said he was misunderstood.


"Well," Obama explained, "obviously, it's going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations."


Despite telling the AIPCAC conference what it wanted to hear and believe, an undivided Jerusalem was, in fact, never his campaign's position.


Obama's adviser for the Middle East, former Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, in May told the Israeli mass circulation daily, Haaretz, that his campaign considers it "impossible to make progress on serious peace talks without putting the future of Jerusalem on the table."


In the Democratic primaries, 53 percent of Jewish voters chose Hillary Clinton compared to 45% who chose Obama.