Engaging Hamas

George Bush doesn’t get it, neither does Olmert. Hamas is the duly elected governing party of the Palestinian people. It’s not Fatah and Abbas. They lost the election, Hamas won.

Hamas isn’t a very likable outfit. It is, however, the chosen voice of a radicalized population. If we could ever get past idiots like Bush and Olmert, we might also find that Hamas could, possibly, be the key to easing the radical nature of the Palestinian people.

Bush ought to just back out of this thing anyway. He’s been revealed as a blatant manipulator who co-opted Abbas against the will of the Palestinian people, sparking a bloody civil war in the result.

Somebody else needs to step in – and I mean step in with troops. It has to be a coalition of countries that can still be seen, on both sides, as unbiased. That isn’t going to be easy, both sides embracing the delusional “you’re either with me or against me” philosophy that’s worked so well for George w. Bush. Since we probably won’t satisfy either of them, the UN will have to ensure that it sets the bar high and satisfies itself.

Next step. Option A. Back to the pre-1967 borders and I mean back. One big 5-year plan to remove all Israeli settlement beyond its pre-1967 borders, everything. Out, gone. Jerusalem either a free city or partitioned. Full compensation for Arabs forced out post 1949 which can be offset by the value of Israeli-owned assets left behind in Palestinian territory. Agreement to guarantee sharing of freshwater resources situated in the West Bank. Full recognition of Israel and full trade rights with the Arab nations. Aid to Israel to help in accommodating relocated settlers. Then, a 10-mile wide demilitarized zone along the Israeli-Palestinian borders.

Or

Option B. A one-state solution. Full citizenship for every Palestinian living within the combined Israel-Palestinian state. Full voting rights, human rights and all other political freedoms.

Israel gets to choose.

Option A would be the only practical solution for Israel. The single state option wouldn’t work demographically. The Palestinians would soon gain an ethnic majority that would translate into electoral control. To retain Jewish political control, Palestinians would have to be disenfranchised in a form of apartheid. Unacceptable, flat out.

Give the Palestinian people something to work for, something to build, instead of always leaving them with just something to fight for. We’ve had that experiment for half a century and have seen how well it’s worked. You want to eliminate radicalism? That’s where you begin. Give them their own country, give them a Marshall Plan that floods them with aid to build that place into something worth having as quickly as possible, and you’ll have not just a roadmap but the road itself.

You can’t get this started until you acknowledge the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinians, no matter how distasteful you may find that. If you want to see the face of the Palestinian leadership, don’t look at them, look a decade or two beyond them and then start creating the opportunity for that future, progressive leadership to emerge and take hold.

Or not. You can always go back and ship over more boatloads of clusterbombs and attack jets because, surely, you just need a few more of them to solve the problem, just a few more.

 

5 Good Reasons, 5 Bad Reasons to Criticize Israel

I found this article at Haaretz.com, a liberal Israeli newspaper. It’s really something to think about:

Five of the following are reasonable. Five are not.

This is a reflection, if nothing else, of the duality of leftist criticism of Israel. There are leftists whose critiques are clear-eyed, factually valid, morally on point. And then there are those for whom Israel represents a blood-boiling factory of evil, an entity whose very existence is an affront, an abomination. Those who are convinced, and seek to convince the world, that the Jewish state should cease to exist.

“Why does the left hate Israel? Here are five good reasons:

1. Because Israel’s policies are frequently marked by gratuitous humiliation of and disdain for the Palestinians.

2. Because Israelis can live with this. If the policies hinted at in 1. above are associated with a status quo which Israelis find tolerably calm and Palestinians find unbearable, even lethal, Israel’s leaders often view this as a viable and even optimal outcome.

3. Because Israel, in practice, values settlements more than it values social justice.The right will tell you that there is no contradiction between settlements and social justice. Which would be true if there were no Palestinians, and if the Palestinians did not view the land occupied by settlements as theirs, historically, legally, and morally. And which would be true if the same consideration offered settlers in fixing the route of the West Bank fence were applied to Palestinians, that is, were farmers not cut off from their fields, pupils from their schools, and close relatives from one another.

The right will tell you that the settlements are no obstacle to peace. But that same right will also argue that the settlements are the only real bulwark between the Palestinians and an independent Palestine.

4. Because Israel, even in withdrawing from Gaza, has left it to die. It is not lost on leftists that many Israelis reap a distinct satisfaction from the Palestinians’ inability to help themselves, govern themselves, save themselves. Leftists may note that Israel has done everything in its power to convince the world to deny much-needed aid to a democratically elected government, and that Israel has not acted as a neighbor whose primary concern is an eventual peace.

5. Because of the propensity of Israel’s leaders to demonstrate arrogance, claim a monopoly on the moral high ground, set non-negotiable demands to which Palestinian politicians cannot agree, then condemn Palestinians for intransigence.

Here, then, are five bad reasons:

1. The Palestinian cause is inherently progressive.As currently constituted, Palestinian governance is marked by institutional graft, widespread human rights violations, curbs on press freedoms, tribalism, blood feuds, murders of women on the basis of contentions of preservation of family honor, and celebration of the targeting and killing of non-combatants as a legitimate form of resistance to occupation.

2. Israel remains the sole root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the reason it remains unresolved.As root causes go, both sides have demonstrated profound intransigence, both sides have violated agreements with abandon, both sides suffer from extremists whose power to destroy a peace process far outweighs their proportion of the population.In addition, the contention that Israel is solely responsible suggests that the solution of the Mideast conflict is the dissolution of Israel.

This brings us to:3.

Israel is a Jewish state.For a vocal minority of leftists, this fact alone – coupled with the following two arguments – is enough to call into serious question Israel’s right to exist. This argument, which holds that the formally Jewish nature of the state enshrines an unconscionable level of racism, dovetails with:

4. Israel is an apartheid state.See Occupation: It’s horrid, but it’s not apartheid

5. Israel’s actions are comparable to those of Nazi Germany.This contention may be the genuine litmus test for anti-Semitism on the left. In the end, the compulsion to accuse Israel of genocide, while turning a blind eye to wholesale slaughter in Darfur and elsewhere, tends to say a great deal more about the accuser than the accused. “

Haaretz is a welcome voice of moderation. It recognizes that others can criticize Israeli policies and actions without being anti-semitic just as some critics truly are anti-semites.