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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (10912)	5/12/2006 6:58:41 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22250

Why Are Hamas Peace Moves Ignored? by Ira Chernus For once, the government of Israel has done the Palestinian people a favor. The Israelis locked up some leaders of the two rival Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, in the same prison. Prisoners have plenty of time to talk. The imprisoned Fatah and Hamas men talked long enough to reach a shared vision of how the Palestinians might live peacefully side by side with Israel. The Hamas side in the talks agreed that they would have to recognize the state of Israel and let it live inside its pre-1967 borders. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah man, says he endorses the compromise plan. It’s not clear how Hamas, as a party, will decide. The proposal could well split the party in two. Now suppose you were Ehud Olmert, the leader of Israel’s government. Here is your sworn enemy, Hamas, with control of the Palestinian parliament. It’s the stumbling block to peace and security you say, because it refuses to accept Israel’s existence. Now it’s trying to decide whether to back down from that rejectionist stance. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to support the moderates and make sure the decision goes their way? Then you’d have no significant Palestinian faction refusing to recognize Israel. Peace talks could begin, and finally there would be an end in sight to Israel’s nightmare. So you might expect Olmert to rush to the microphones and announce that he’ll welcome the proposed agreement. You might expect him to describe all the reciprocal steps Israel will take in exchange for full recognition from Hamas: more aid to ease the horrendous financial crisis in Palestine, removing some Israeli troops from tense areas, stopping construction on the wall that Palestinians hate so much. There are a hundred things Israel could promise to do to signal support for the Hamas moderates. But so far Olmert has been silent. Perhaps he calculates that silence is the wiser course, since an endorsement from Israel could actually weaken the moderates’ cause. But actions speak louder than words. It would be easy for Israel to signal its willingness to conciliate by taking small steps today. Unfortunately Israel’s only overt act today was yet another military raid on “suspected militants” in the West Bank. The only comment from the Israeli government came from a Foreign Ministry spokesman who brushed off the Fatah-Hamas plan as “an internal Palestinian affair.” Internal? Hardly. The life of every person in Israel will be affected by the outcome of this Hamas debate. If the Hamas moderates fail to persuade the hard-liners to accept the plan, it could mean years more of bloodshed in Israel as well as Palestine. This is all tragically predictable. The Israeli government has a long inglorious record of failure when a real opportunity for peace and security is at hand. Whenever Israel has a chance to support Palestinian moderates by taking conciliatory steps, it almost always refuses the chance and takes the hard-line direction. Israel conciliates only to support Palestinian “sub-contractors,” who may speak words critical of Israel but promote policies that Israel has already approved. (It was right-wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu who said that Israel would make peace only with Palestinian leaders who were “sub-contractors.”) The Hamas moderates are not “sub-contractors.” They are willing to accept Israel’s existence and promise it security, but only in return for full sovereignty over all of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem. It’s roughly the same kind of deal that Yasir Arafat insisted on. If Israel had accepted that compromise from Arafat at Camp David six years ago, the Middle East could now be moving closer to peace. But the Israelis refused. They stigmatized Arafat as an “irrelevant” obstacle to peace. Now they are likely to do the same to the Hamas moderates. Then the Hamas hard-liners will say, with good reason, “See. We told you there’s no reasoning with Israel. The only option is to keep on fighting.” And tragically, Israel will make that argument seem persuasive to many Palestinians. Every time there is an internal Palestinian debate like this, and the Israelis refuse to offer signs of moderation, they doom the Palestinian moderates to irrelevance and add fuel to the Middle East fire. There’s no question that Israeli policy aims to keep the conflict going. The only question is, Why? The answers are endlessly complex. Some Israelis (like some Palestinians) get money and power by keeping the battle going. But not very many. Most Israelis just suffer from it. Yet Olmert and other Israeli leaders are probably right to figure that they’ll get more votes by refusing genuine reconciliation. Most Jewish Israelis want to prevent a genuinely independent and successful Palestinian state, even if it formally recognizes Israel. They are convinced that a Palestinian state not controlled by Israel will try to destroy Israel sooner or later. You can tell them that it’s the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have backed down time after time after time, as the Hamas moderates are backing down now. You can point out the obvious reason why: They know that Israel is here to stay. With one of the strongest armies in the world and some 200 nuclear weapons, Israel will always be able to crush Palestine (or any other Arab nation) in a day. But facts and logic don’t matter here. Insecurity is embedded deep in the identity of most Jewish Israelis, and thus in the identity of their nation. Many would hardly know what it means to be Israeli, or to be Jewish, if they did not have an enemy sworn to destroy them. So no Israeli politician can hope to succeed by offering the Palestinians genuine rapprochement. Here in the U.S. the hard-line Israeli supporters, who are the most insecure, wield influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Maybe that’s why the dramatic new sign of moderation within Hamas went virtually unreported in the mainstream U.S. press. It should have been headline news. It offers at least a glimmer of hope that there is a way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it’s almost a banal truism to say that this conflict is at the heart of all of America’s troubles in the Middle East. Leaders like Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahamdinejad know that well. They use the cause of Palestinian justice as a rhetorical weapon to promote anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Muslim world. And it works, because Muslims -- like anyone else who is paying attention -- know that the Palestinians have indeed been treated unjustly. When Israel and the U.S. ignore this latest move toward peace by Palestinian leaders, they only confirm the view that American and Israeli leaders don’t really want peace; they want power and control. As we watch peace moves by Hamas get ignored, just as conciliatory statements from Iran’s government are ignored, it becomes harder and harder to argue with that gloomy assessment. It’s all just too tragic for words. But those of us who see what’s happening have to find words and speak out as loudly as we can before these precious opportunities for peace slip away. Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of "American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea" and later this year will publish "Monster to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin." Email to: chernus@colorado.edu