In short, they are not Germany with Nazis. Hamas rhetoric is inflamatory but read the Jerusalem Post talkback for you English readers and you will see statements equally inflamatory to Hamas. For Hebrew speakers go to Israel and listen to the words of Likud and many Kadima Knesset members as they give talks to their constituents. Some of them will make your hair curl. The Jews of modern Israel ate NOT the Jews of 1930’s and 40’s in Germany and Poland. They do not cower in fear and are perfectly willing to take WHATEVER steps are necessary to get what they want. Now all you have to guess is what they really want.

The Israeli/Palestinian problem has to be solved one way or another. It cannot be solved without the buy in of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad (a far more dangerous group than Hamas) and ALL the neighboring arab countries.

And – I for one have learned from WWII and the Nazis. When people say that they want to kill all Zionists (read: Jews), wipe Israel off the map, that Jews are monsters, etc., I take them seriously.

“The most dangerous illusion to emerge from the U.S.-Israeli discussions is the idea that Hamas can be isolated in Gaza while Mr. Abbas is built up in the West Bank. The Palestinian president is unlikely to abandon the 1.5 million people of Gaza to a de facto military and economic siege. If he does, Hamas will use its own forces to ensure that the West Bank also is ungovernable or to start a new war with Israel. As repugnant as its terrorism and ideology are, Hamas won a free election and still has the support of a large part of the Palestinian population. It cannot be abolished by decree, and isolation will only make it more radical and more dependent on sponsors in Syria and Iran.” Washpost

—————————————————————

Is Fred Hiatt (editorial page editor of WAPO) on vacation? How did this editorial manage to find its way to the top of the page?

Then you cut out this paragraph that is between the text from your comment.

Fred Hiatt is a Bushy apparatchik, a cuckoo planted in the editorial “nest” of the Washington Post. He has transformed the once liberal newspaper’s “meditations” into something nearly unrecognizable. Has he suddenly had a “road to Damascus” moment? Hmmm, that might be an awkward phrase on several levels.

If they had a chance they would transfer the Jews out, not exterminate them.

Unfortunately, that’s not what they actually say.

I’m curious as to why you want to sugercoat Hamas here. Do you have something specific that leads you to believe they are harmless or misunderstood? Or do you have a general orientation that leads you to prefer giving the benefit of the doubt to Palestinian groups in general or Hamas in particular?

I hope you notice that I’m not ascribing any negative motives here, but am asking about actually plausible possibilities. I have a very negative view of Hamas based on my readings of what they have actually said and what they have actually done. If my interpretation is wrong, I’d like to know more than just assertions that I am wrong.

As a Jew with relatives in Israel who hopes some day to be buried there, I am concerned about Israel’s future. It is not the threat from Hamas I am concerned about, it’s the general muslim world. Israel cannot continue with this high profile antagonism generated by their treatment of the Palestinians. It’s been 40 years after all.

You’ve got a million+ Israeli arabs who have gone from ambivelence toward Israel to almost hatred of their own country. Why? Because they are treated like dirt in Israel – not terribly better than non-Israeli Palestinians. Their schools are atrocious and funding for arab schools is about 1/3 of Jewish schools. An Israeli arab getting a permit to open his own business is just about impossible these days. I could spend days telling you how descrimination, direct and indirect, is infused in the Israeli culture. Yet the arab population in 50 years will probably equal or exceed Jews and then they will get their revenge.

Israel won the last three wars against the arabs but one of these days their winning streak will come to an end. Nobody bats 1000 forever. Their only permanent salvation rests on establishing a firm and lasting peace with their arab neighbors, solidified by unshakeable economic ties. The last thing Israel needs is to deepen and entrench the hatred arabs have for them. Without a Peace, Israel will not last 50 years – the arabs will get them and it will be catastrophic. No one keeps a grudge better than arabs.

I think Jews deserve aand need a homeland and Israel is the spot. However, we will have nothing if we continue to be greedy about how much of the land is really necessary for our existence.

Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and the PLO ALL once said the same thing. After some talking about a serious peace offering they recognized Israel and while the peace is cold, the incitement is minimal. Could the same thing happen with hamas?

Apparently not. Remember, when Hamas was elected, Israel, the Europeans, and the U.S. all explicitly asked them to drop their call for genocide and offered them the same deal that had been offered to the previous negotiation partners if they did so. Hamas explicitly refused, and even went out of its way to reiterate its goal of genocide.

It is fundamentally unreasonable to ask any group of people to “recognize” a political entity that is explicitly asking for their genocidal extermination. Any group that advocates genocide is by definition not a legitimate negotiating partner. You can’t negotiate with people who think mass murder is not only acceptable, but desirable.

In addition, you’re not likely to find many takers to the idea that “you can vote democratically, just as long as you vote for the people we want”.

Again, I understand that the problem is difficult (that may be the only thing clear about the whole mess) but pretending like you can force Palestinians to back Fatah, or that you can literally shoot Hamas out of existence, is simplistic at best. Not saying I know what the hell to do, I don’t know that ANYONE has a good solution.

The only thing that will solve it is a peace agreement.

Name the leader with which the Israeli’s can negotiate? Name the leader than speaks for all Palestinians and can enforce an agreement on the Palestinian side?

The fact is that the Palestinian side is in civil freakin war! Until they get their own house in order, provide a semi-united front and a legitimate leader with which to negotiate (and is willing to negotiate) how are the Israeli’s supposed to work toward peace, even if they were so inclined? It’s impossible. The ball is not in Israel’s court.

The only thing that will solve it is a peace agreement.

I just don’t know how any state can even start on a peace agreement with a group that is explicitly dedicated to its destruction and the genocide of its people. You can criticize Barak’s offer a lot, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the flaws inherent to Hamas’ negotiating position which can be summed up as “shut up and die”.

If you recall, Olmert during the original Kadima campaign ran around telling people the the Gaza withdrawal was formeldehyde so that Israel would not have to abandon the West Bank. You have Knesset members running all over the West Bank telling settlers not to worry – we’ll NEVER LEAVE and never turn over the Jordan Valley to “them”.

If two countries are formed then if the Palestinians act up, Israel can do what they always have done -retaliate and the world will be behind them. They can build Walls on their own territory – they can do lots of things. However, the Palestinians would have something to lose if they had their own country – they have nothing now.

Even if I agree that Israeli policy towards Palestinians from 1967 to 1987 was foolhardy, counterproductive, and even immoral, what do you propose Israel does about the rockets that are raining daily on civilians in north and south Israel, suicide bombers that seek entry to bomb yet another pizza parlor or wedding, and the seizure of power by a group of religious extremists that is already killing opponents, imposing Shari’a law on women, trashing the tiny Christian community, and continuing its longstanding calls for the genocide of the Jews? Should Israel just sit by and quietly ponder its historical guilt while all this goes on? Or should Israel look to ensure its own defense?

There may be a strong future ahead, but it’s based on economics and industry — and that requires calm and a focus on civil society that respects rule of law and property rights.

Has a calm civil society ever emerged under martial law?

Is that non inflamatory enough for you?

I take issue with some of what Crittenden is saying because I’m not sure that Fatah is strong enough to be rehabilitated and focus on anything more than self-interested wealth and power accumulation. But Israel has a nasty habit of rehabilitating it’s enemies, so we’ll see… I’ve come to the point of believing that if the world wants Israel to revisit 1967, the other warring parties — Egypt and Jordan — are going to have to come back to the table and be part of a future solution. In the absence of that, it’ll be status quo for the West Bank and who knows what for Gaza. I do not think the Palestinians are capable of self-rule at this point that doesn’t pose a threat to Israel. Israel screwed up time and again and is in many ways complicit in the current state of affairs, but hindsight is 20/20 and history is nothing if not a series of unintended consequences. Might not be fair, but there’s simply no way that Israel is going grant autonomy to a radicalized population that has proven time and again it is incapable of keeping calm.

There may be a strong future ahead, but it’s based on economics and industry — and that requires calm and a focus on civil society that respects rule of law and property rights. Just not happening right now… If Stef Wertheimer gave up, I’m sure as heck not going to have hope.

But predictions in this part of the world are a dime a dozen and overrated at best. We’ll see what happens…

In any event, I think Col. Pat Lang’s comments on the issue are the best I’ve read so far:

One of the most dangerous features of the joint Israeli/AIPAC/US/WINEP policy toward the “question” of Palestine has been the “dangerous illusion” that the Palestinians (and, indeed all the Middle Eastern peoples) are a bit like malicious children who can be coaxed, cajoled or manipulated into doing whatever the “grownups” want them to do.

I observed on the tube a week ago that it is very difficult under any circumstances to tell a people who their leaders may be. It is even more difficult to do that when those leaders were democratically elected in a process held to be fair by the international community. The US/Israeli/AIPAC/WINEP position seems to be to “hope” that the bribery and threats being employed against Hamas will bring the Palestinians to accept that they may not have Hamas as their government until Hamas accepts de jure the permanent existence of Israel. The Palestinians have never shown any vulnerability to such “arguments” before. Why do we/they think that will work now? There are no countries or parties in the Arab World that truly accept Israel. Even the ones who have signed treaties with Israel have done so most grudgingly and exist in a state of “cold peace” with her. Is FATAH really reconciled to the idea of Israel? If you think so, just wait a few months. What you will see is the commencement of operations against Israel by factions of FATAH.

I don’t agree with everything in his post, but I think the administration’s policy of supporting Fatah as the lesser of two evils is not very smart and will not provide the the policy claims.

I think it’s also worth reading Pollack over at Micheal Totten’s place:

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, who yesterday on National Public Radio declared that the Hamas takeover “is a direct, logical, inevitable result of American, Israeli, and European policy…They almost willed this result.” Kramer thunders back:

At bottom, Khalidi is no different from the general run of blame-throwing Palestinian hacks. One of the (many) reasons Palestinians have marched themselves down so many dead ends is the abject failure of their intellectuals, who’ve been so busy speaking “truth to power” that they’ve forgotten to speak it to their own people. Khalidi is no exception, and as someone who’s fed Palestinian mythology for decades, he’s just as thoroughly implicated in the mess as any masked gunman.

The deeper lesson here is that a society that has spent the last decade celebrating suicide bombing would inevitably become a victim of its own nihilistic impulses. This is not the result of Mr. Bush’s call for democratic responsibility; it is the bitter fruit of the decades of dictatorship and terrorism as statecraft that Yasser Arafat instilled among Palestinians.

Let me use a few of your boogeymen to create an analogy for you.

Iran has invaded the Netherlands with the financial backing of Germany. You as well as your friends and family have been forced to leave your homes and move to a shanty town in Rotterdam.

Rotterdam, a city that was home to 500,000 people is now home to more than 1.5 million. The shanty towns themselves are walled in, you have to pass through Iranian military checkpoints to get to your job where you are paid pennies a day. You are not allowed to use the paved roads, reserved now for your Iranian masters.

Fast forward 40 years later. Conditions have not improved. The farmland you worked for the last few years was just taken by Iranian settlers. Most people you know are still starving. You have seen family and friends die from lack of food and sanitation. Others were killed in Iranian raids to root out the nationalist secular resistance movement.

Two religious resistance movements have risen In the wake of the destruction of the nationalist resistance. It will soon be time to choose sides.

One side appears to be more moderate than the other, although they are still willing to resort to violence to achieve their goals. The only thing is, there are credible reports that they are getting shipments of weapons and money from the Iranian/German regime. The same regime that has forced you from your home, starved you for 40 years, killed your family and friends, and deprived you of your livelihood.

Both sides promise independence, so which side would you choose?