Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas Political Bureau
Please read this in conjunction with the article posted an hour or two ago:
HAMAS: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
By Henry Siegman
September 4, 2010
Introduction
Failed bilateral talks over these past 16 years have shown that a Middle East peace accord can never be reached by the parties themselves. Israeli governments believe they can defy international condemnation of their illegal colonial project in the West Bank because they can count on the US to oppose international sanctions.
Bilateral talks that are not framed by US-formulated parameters (based on Security Council resolutions, the Oslo accords, the Arab Peace Initiative, the "road map" and other previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements) cannot succeed.
Israel's government believes that the US Congress will not permit an American president to issue such parameters and demand their acceptance. What hope there is for the bilateral talks that resume in Washington DC on September 2 depends entirely on President Obama proving that belief to be wrong, and on whether the "bridging proposals" he has promised, should the talks reach an impasse, are a euphemism for the submission of American parameters.
Such a US initiative must offer Israel iron-clad assurances for its security within its pre-1967 borders, but at the same time must make it clear these assurances are not available if Israel insists on denying Palestinians a viable and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza.
This paper focuses on the other major obstacle to a permanent status agreement: the absence of an effective Palestinian interlocutor. Addressing Hamas' legitimate grievances ~ and as noted in a recent CENTCOM report, Hamas has legitimate grievances ~ could lead to its return to a Palestinian coalition government that would provide Israel with a credible peace partner.
If that outreach fails because of Hamas' rejectionism, the organization's ability to prevent a reasonable accord negotiated by other Palestinian political parties will have been significantly impeded.
In 1948, the PM of Israel stated the they would not settle until all of Israel was taken over by Israelis and that all other agreements were invalid. After all God had given them all of Palestine.
If the Obama administration will not lead an international initiative to define the parameters of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and actively promote Palestinian political reconciliation, Europe must do so, and hope America will follow. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that can guarantee the goal of "two states living side by side in peace and security." But President Obama's present course absolutely precludes it.
Obama is owned by the primarily Jewish bankers of Wall Street and is surrounded by Jews. His Chief of Staff is a militant Zionist from an "upstanding" (By Israeli standards) terrorist family. What chance does an inexperienced man have to pull off such a coup? If ever such a coup came about, the idea he brought it about would be a media created illusion.
Road to nowhere
Peace talks at an impasseThe Obama administration has reversed the trajectory of previous administrations' engagement with the Middle East peace process. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush avoided dealing with the issue in the early stages of their presidency. President Clinton pursued a peace agreement far more seriously than did President Bush, but not until the closing days of his second term.
By contrast, President Obama addressed the issue aggressively virtually the day after he took his oath of office. He appointed Senator Mitchell his personal Middle East peace envoy, delivered a historic speech to the Arab and Muslim world in Cairo, and presented Netanyahu's government the toughest demand for a freeze on all further Israeli settlement enlargement in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem ever made by any US administration ~ and all within the first year of the first term of his presidency.
But it has been all downhill since. The settlement freeze Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to turned out to be a sham, the proximity talks a monumental waste of time. President Obama's most recent encounter with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on July 6, at which he felt constrained to express admiration for the seriousness of the commitment to a two-state solution of a man who has shown nothing but disdain for the idea, has triggered despair throughout the region deeper than was experienced during the disengaged Bush administration.
Bilateral talks cannot succeed
The US administration has announced the launching of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and that the parties have agreed to place a one-year limit on these talks. But nothing much beyond spin to sustain the illusion of continued American "engagement" can be expected from this administration until at least after the November congressional elections, if then. That interregnum provides time for a reconsideration of this administration's Middle East peace strategies that have been undone with humiliating ease by Netanyahu at every turn.
Such a reconsideration must begin with a rejection of the notion that a Middle East peace accord can ever be reached by the parties themselves, with the US role limited to "facilitation."
Failed bilateral talks over these past 16 years have shown that left to their own devices, negotiations between Israeli governments ~ that believe resorting to overwhelming military power is the solution to every political and security challenge ~ and a powerless Palestinian adversary can only result in the enlargement and completion of Israel's colonial project in the West Bank, notwithstanding American "facilitation," or "bridging proposals," as this administration prefers to call it.
Bilateral talks that are not framed by US-formulated parameters (based on Security Council resolutions, the Oslo accords, the Arab Peace Initiative, the "road map" and other previous Israeli- Palestinian agreements) cannot succeed.
A two-state solution will remain beyond everyone's reach because even the most hardline Israeli governments are convinced that the US Congress will not permit an American president to issue such parameters and demand their acceptance by Israel. Israeli governments believe they can defy international condemnations of their colonial project in the West Bank because they can count on the US to oppose international measures that would sanction their illegal behaviour.
AIPAC would bring America down over such a thing.
If it is to succeed, a US effort to rescue the two- state option must be prepared to offer Israel iron- clad assurances for its security within its pre-1967 borders, but at the same time make it clear that such assurances are not available if Israel insists on denying Palestinians a viable and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Credible Palestinian partner lacking
Which brings us to the other major obstacle to a permanent status agreement ~ the absence of an effective Palestinian interlocutor, due to the bitter internecine divisions between Fatah and Hamas, divisions that have been fostered and deepened by US and European support for Israel's determination to exclude Hamas from Palestinian political life and to bring about its demise.
It should be clear by now that this policy has only strengthened Hamas, and that it has retained the ability to torpedo any Israeli- Palestinian peace agreement it is not party to.
America and Israel also use the Divide and Conquer technique in Palestine because Israel has no intention, in the long run, of doing more than owning all land between the Litani and the Nile. Israel wants all Palestinians dead or gone.
This view, shared by virtually every Middle Eastern political and security expert, was expressed concisely as the conclusion of a recent essay on the subject in Foreign Affairs: "Hamas is here to stay. Refusing to deal with it will only make the situation worse: Palestinian moderates will become weaker, and Hamas will grow stronger. If the Obama administration is to move its plans for peace forward, the challenge of Hamas has to be met first."1
As argued in this paper, a more balanced approach to Hamas, addressing legitimate grievances, could lead to its return to a Palestinian coalition government that would provide Israel with a credible peace partner. If that outreach fails because of Hamas' rejectionism, its ability to prevent a reasonable accord negotiated by other Palestinian political parties will have been seriously undermined.
The misreading of Hamas
Hamas' democratic mandate
Mahmoud Abbas's rule does not extend much beyond Ramallah. Although Fatah was unopposed by Hamas (or by any other organized political party) in the local West Bank elections of July 17, the party is so dysfunctional and unpopular that its candidates were in danger of losing to local unaffiliated candidates, causing Abbas to call off the elections at the last moment.
By contrast, Hamas is not only the effective ruler of Gaza, but the only political party that received a democratic mandate for its rule from the Palestinian electorate in the 2006 election that rejected Fatah.
The Oslo accords declared Gaza to be an inseparable part of Palestine, and obliged Israel to provide an unobstructed territorial connection linking Gaza to the West Bank. That provision was reinforced by a formal Israeli-Palestinian agreement (the Agreement on Movement and Access) in 2005 for the free movement of people and goods between these two areas, brokered by James Wolfensohn, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's special envoy for Gaza disengagement, an obligation Israel violated even before the ink on the document dried.2
Israel leaders have repeatedly stated that Israel is accountable to none and will do what they please in these matters. They say none can judge them although they can judge any as they please.
Hamas was denied its electoral mandate and excluded from the West Bank because Fatah conspired with Israel's government and the Bush administration to carry out a putsch by Mohammed Dahlan's militia forces in Gaza to overthrow Hamas. The attempted putsch was pre-empted by Hamas in a bloody manner.3
But the way Dahlan's forces had previously dealt with Hamas' members that it had imprisoned (or the way Abbas' Fatah has dealt with them in the West Bank since) should not leave anyone with false illusions about the treatment that awaited Hamas had Dahlan's putsch succeeded.
Hamas' obsolete charter
But can Hamas be engaged by Israel, or by the US, while it adheres to a charter that is racist and anti- Semitic, and explicitly commits the organization to the violent expulsion of Jews within Israel's internationally recognized pre-1967 borders?
While the government of Israel does not have a charter promising the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the confiscation of their land, it has been doing exactly that ~ regularly and systematically.
These confiscations and expulsions began even before Hamas existed, yet no one in the West demanded Israel be quarantined, or even that it be denied continued massive American financial and military assistance.
More to the point, Hamas has made it abundantly clear that its charter ~ like the PLO's charter which Arafat famously dismissed in 1989 as "caduque" (obsolete, expired) well before it was formally annulled ~ no longer represents Hamas' ideology.
Its various proposals for a long-term hudna (ceasefire) with Israel, if it were to agree to a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, clearly contradict its charter.
A more direct repudiation of the charter's anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic diatribe came from Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas' political bureau, in an interview conducted by the Jordanian Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sabeel in July (translated into English by the Afro-Middle East Centre in South Africa).4
Meshal was asked whether Hamas' resistance was directed "against Zionists as Jews or as occupiers."
Meshal replied, "resistance and military confrontation with the Israelis was caused by occupation, aggression, and crimes committed against the Palestinian people, not because of differences in religion or belief."
He said that although "religion is a cornerstone to our lives … we do not make of religion a force for engendering hatred, nor a cause or a pretext for harming or assaulting others, or grabbing what is not ours, or encroaching on the rights of others" ~ referring, of course, to the Israeli settlers' invocation of the Bible to justify the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank.Contrast this to the declarations of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and the leader of the most important Orthodox political party in Israel, during a recent Sabbath sermon:
"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from the world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians." In a previous sermon in 2001, he told his followers: "It is forbidden to be merciful to [the Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."
Such statements are met by the great majority of Israelis with support and approval.
Recognising Israel
At a press conference in April 2008, Meshal stated that within the context of a Palestinian coalition government of which it was a part, Hamas would authorize Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority to conduct peace negotiations with Israel.
If an accord were reached, he said, Hamas would agree to have it submitted to a Palestinian referendum and, if approved, would abide by the outcome even if Hamas itself were opposed to the accord.5 (This arrangement was also part of the agreement reached in Mecca for a Hamas-Fatah unity government that fell apart.)
Shortly after the press conference I told Usama Hamdan, a leading member of Hamas' political bureau, that a Palestinian government cannot sign a peace agreement with Israel and still maintain that it does not recognize it. Hamdan agreed, and told me that Meshal agreed as well. He noted that since state-to-state recognition is a governmental responsibility, not a function of individual political parties, Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel does not prevent a government of which Hamas is a part from granting that recognition.
He noted that Israeli governments ~ including the current one, whose prime minister claims to want a two-state solution ~ have included political parties that oppose Palestinian statehood, and no one has suggested this disqualifies these governments as partners for peace negotiations, or made them candidates for sanctions of the kind imposed on Hamas.
Israeli contradictions
Israel's government undoubtedly rejects that distinction between political parties and governments as sophistry, and considers those who advance it as peddling pro-Hamas propaganda. But it is a distinction that Netanyahu himself must invoke to explain the contradiction between his declared acceptance of a two-state solution and the formal opposition to a Palestinian state of his own Likud Party.
Indeed, not long after Netanyahu made that two-state declaration, most of his cabinet ministers formed a parliamentary caucus in Israel's Knesset, called the Land of Israel Caucus, whose goal it is to defeat their own government's effort to allow a Palestinian state in any part of Palestine in the unlikely event it were to try to do so.
(It is not difficult to imagine how Netanyahu would have reacted to a "moderate" Palestinian government made up of parties dedicated to the denial of Israeli statehood.)
More recently, in a TV interview with Charlie Rose, Khaled Meshal stated that Hamas will end its resistance activities when Israel ends its occupation and accepts a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 border.
This reverses Hamas' previous commitment to a struggle to recover all of Palestine. Israelis and their supporters in the US ridicule anyone who credits such statements, pointing out that in that same interview Meshal insisted on the Palestinian refugees' "right of return," which he knows no Israeli government will accept.6
Apparently they expect Hamas to concede that right ~ one that Abbas and Fatah also demand ~ before negotiations have begun.
But they do not similarly ridicule Netanyahu's declared support for a two-state solution even when he attaches conditions everyone knows no Palestinian leader would ever accept.
Defenders of Netanyahu insist he must be left with negotiating room for the compromises he will have to make, but apparently believe Palestinians do not deserve that same consideration.
It is this feigned Israeli ridicule of any Arab opening towards Israel that sank King Abdullah's peace initiative of 2002 offering to normalize the relations of all Arab states with Israel; "feigned," because
It is not scepticism of Arab seriousness that is behind Israeli leaders' dismissal of Palestinian or Arab states' outreach to them, but the fear that it may be sincere, and would therefore compel serious Israeli responses that would expose Israel's real positions on final status.
That exposure is something Netanyahu has so far refused to risk, for it would prove that the territorial and security constraints he intends to impose on Palestinian sovereignty amount to a continuation of Israel's occupation under some other name. It was Netanyahu's refusal to provide that information to Obama when they met at the White House on March 23 that precipitated the crisis in Israeli-US relations that Obama sought to diffuse so humiliatingly at their meeting of July 6.
Hamas ~ pragmatic and opportunistic
But it is not only Israel that has ignored significant changes in Hamas. The United States and Europe have done so as well, insisting that Hamas must first accept conditions for engagement designed by Israel expressly to preclude the possibility of their acceptance.
There is no reason for the US to continue to support these conditions. Obama has not imposed similar conditions for talks with the Taliban. To the contrary: he is encouraging the return of the Taliban to a coalition government with President Hamid Karzai even as they are killing American forces and Afghan civilians. Is the Taliban's ideology more congenial to Obama than that of Hamas, many of whose leaders and adherents are university graduates, and who encourage rather than forbid and punish the education of their daughters?
Questioned by his interviewer in Al-Sabeel about the "marginalisation of women's role in political and social life," Meshal stated that this marginalisation "does not come from the text and spirit of the Sharia," but is the result of "cultural backwardness." He declared that Hamas will not allow "the ages of backwardness or the weight of social norms and traditions that stem from the environment rather than the religious text" to distort Islamic concepts, "especially since the environment of Palestine is not a closed one but a historically civilized one, enjoying plurality and openness to all religions, civilizations and cultures."
In a confidential report to CENTCOM's commander, General David Petraeus, these intelligence officials questioned the current US policy of isolating and marginalizing Hamas and Hizbullah, and urged that Washington instead encourage them to integrate with their respective political mainstreams.
They reject Israel's view that Hamas is incapable of change and must be confronted with force.
At the heart of Hamas' grievances is the double standard that Israel, the US and Europe apply to the entire range of issues the peace talks are intended to resolve.They maintain Hamas is pragmatic and opportunistic, and that failing to recognize its grievances will result in our continuing failure to get it to moderate its behaviour.
Hamas' leadership maintains that what distinguishes its movement from Fatah is its refusal to swallow this hypocrisy.
It insists on absolute reciprocity, especially with respect to the Quartet's three conditions for removing the political quarantine against it.
These conditions require Hamas to recognize the State of Israel, accept all previous agreements with Israel, and renounce violence. Yet these three obligations ~ every one of them ~ have been regularly ignored and violated by Netanyahu and preceding Israeli governments.
Settlements violate agreements
While insisting on Hamas' recognition of Israel (a requirement to which Netanyahu has added the demand that Palestinians also declare Israel the legitimate national home of the Jewish people), Israeli governments have refused to affirm a Palestinian right to statehood anywhere within Palestine's borders. That right has been rejected not only rhetorically but by the creation of so-called "facts on the ground," ie, Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, intended to prevent a Palestinian state from ever coming into being.
The argument that the settlements are necessary to assure territorial adjustments required for Israel's security has no credibility. The settlement enterprise long ago exceeded the most expansively defined Israeli security needs.
It was not Israel's Peace Now but former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who, while still in office, ridiculed such claims. Olmert said that for Israel's military and security establishments, "it's all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories (sic) and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless." He added, "Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"8
Palestinian rights not recognised by Israel
Netanyahu's acceptance of a two-state solution, which has not been taken seriously by anyone in Israel, is not based on his recognition of the Palestinian right to national self-determination. Netanyahu led the successful opposition to Ariel Sharon's effort in 2002 to prevent the Likud's executive committee from declaring its rejection of a Palestinian state, thus precipitating Sharon's departure from the Likud to the newly-formed Kadima party.
As long as Israel's government refuses to delineate its borders and to recognize the right of Palestinians to a state of their own east of the 1967 lines, Hamas will reject demands that a Palestinian state of which it is a part recognise Israel. As noted above, Netanyahu refused to indicate his government's definition of Israel's borders even in the privacy of his meeting with President Obama at the White House on March 23.
The second Quartet condition is that Hamas abide by all previous Israeli-Palestinian accords. Clearly, neither President Obama nor the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, believe Israel has abided by this obligation, or they would not have demanded that Israel halt all further settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. Israel's violations of previous accords have not been limited to borders and settlements, but include the "road map" and the Oslo accords' provisions that the future status of Jerusalem can be determined only by agreement between the parties, not by unilateral fiat, as Netanyahu's government seeks to do.
Non-violent alternative lacking
As to the third condition, renunciation of violence, Israel again is as much in violation of that requirement as is Hamas. On virtually every Israeli measure whose legality has been challenged by the Palestinians ~ eg, the confiscations of Palestinian territory for Jewish settlements, the expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of a security fence on Palestinian territory ~ Israel has prevailed because of its unrestrained resort to violence to subdue or eliminate Palestinians who stand in the way.
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