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Holding the line on Hamas

By: Caroline Glick

The Jewish Press - March 25 2009
www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/38700

 

Once it is sworn into office, Israel's new government will immediately have
to go on a diplomatic offensive.

This month, under Egyptian sponsorship, Hamas and Fatah began negotiating
the formation of a Palestinian unity government that, if agreed upon, will
run the affairs of the Palestinian Authority. From what can be gleaned from
media accounts of the proceedings, it is clear Hamas will control the
government and Fatah will operate as a junior partner responsible for
keeping up international monetary support for the PA. Hamas will not
recognize Israel. And Fatah and Hamas militias will be unified in some
manner and end all cooperation and coordination with Israel.

In short, if formed, the new Palestinian government will be nothing more
than a Hamas-Fatah terror consortium committed to waging continuous war
against Israel.

 

By all accounts, the international community, including the Obama
administration, will recognize and support this government if and when it is
established. Egypt halted the talks last week and sent emissaries to
Washington and Brussels to secure American and European support for it.

General Omar Suleiman, head of Egyptian intelligence, flew to Washington to
meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Egyptian Foreign Minister
Ahmed Aboul Gheit jetted off to Brussels where he made the same case to EU
foreign policy boss Javier Solana. That their missions were successful was
made clear by the announcement that the Hamas-Fatah negotiations were to
resume this week.

Moreover, after meeting with Gheit, Solana threatened the incoming Netanyahu
government that it will suffer international isolation if it does not join
Europe, the U.S. and the Arab world in embracing the establishment of a
Palestinian state as its chief goal in office. In doing so, Solana signaled
that as far as Europe is concerned, the nature of the Palestinian government
is immaterial. The only side that will be blamed for Palestinian aggression
will be Israel.

In Washington too, things are going Hamas's way. President Barak Obama's
Middle East mediator, George Mitchell, has called for the administration to
support a Hamas-Fatah government. Former senior officials with close ties to
the administration like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Lee
Hamilton are publicly calling for U.S. recognition of Hamas.

Given the increased likelihood that the U.S. (and the EU) will recognize
Hamas, one of the swiftly emerging challenges for the incoming Netanyahu
government will be how to contend with the new reality.

As it stands, the incoming government is operating at a severe deficit. Both
outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing Foreign Minister (and
Kadima leader) Tzipi Livni have made it clear they will side with the U.S.
and Europe against their own government.

Livni joined the campaign to isolate the incoming government when, like
Solana, she claimed Netanyahu's refusal to endorse the so-called "two-state
solution" rendered him an extremist with whom she could not cooperate.

On Sunday evening Olmert attacked outgoing Defense Minister (and Labor Party
leader) Ehud Barak for his willingness to join the Netanyahu government. In Olmert's words, "Anyone who consciously walks into a government that does
not believe in two states for two peoples is likely to force Israel into an
isolation it has not seen since its establishment."

Statements like these from Kadima's leaders make it difficult for Netanyahu
to withstand claims by the likes of Scowcroft, Mitchell and British Foreign
Minister David Miliband that the time has come to recognize Hamas. But even
with the likes of Olmert and Livni siding with foreign governments against
him, Netanyahu will still have one option -- and he will have to use it.

Netanyahu and his government will have to exert unrelenting pressure on the
U.S. and individual European governments to end their recognition of Hamas.
He and his colleagues will need to make constant reference to Hamas's terror
activities and to it genocidal covenant. They will have to repeatedly recall
its ties to Iran and its likeness to al Qaeda. They will need to condemn
calls by the Israeli Left to recognize Hamas and use the bully pulpit in
Israel to attack their political opponents for working against the interests
of the state.

We have been here before. In December 1988, prodded by the incoming Bush
administration and the American Jewish Left, the lame duck Reagan
administration opened a dialogue with the PLO, which it claimed had accepted
Israel's right to exist and foresworn terror.

Following the U.S. move, the Shamir government used every opportunity to
point out that the PLO had not given up terrorism and had not in fact
accepted Israel's right to exist. The pressure the Israeli government
exerted on the Bush administration compelled it to break off ties with the
PLO in June 1990 after the PLO committed a terror attack in Israel.

The country that in the end legitimized the PLO was Israel - with the September 1993 Oslo agreement - not the U.S. When then-prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO and brought Yasir Arafat to Gaza, he did
more than pave the road to the White House in gold for Arafat. By telling
the U.S. to embrace the PLO, Israel found itself without recourse when -- in
the space of just a few weeks from the euphoric signing ceremony in the
White House Rose Garden -- the PLO resumed its war against Israel,
transforming the areas Israel had transferred to its control into the
largest terror training bases in the world.

After Oslo, discrediting the PLO meant discrediting the Israeli Left, which
embraced the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians.
Since the Left has dominated most Israeli governments since 1993 and has
retained control over the media, this was a non-starter. And so even when
Fatah - the PLO's governing faction -- openly colludes with Hamas, as it is
currently doing in the negotiations toward the formation of a
Hamas-dominated government, the Israeli Left feels compelled to uphold it as
legitimate and to overlook its hostile behavior.

The most stunning example of the Israeli Left's refusal to criticize Fatah
came last week when Fatah security chief Muhammad Dahlan gave an interview
to PA television where he explained the nature of the PLO/Fatah's deception
of Israel.

Fatah, Dahlan explained, has never recognized Israel. In his words, "We
[Fatah] are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist. Rather,
we are asking Hamas not to do so because Fatah never recognized Israel's
right to exist."

What Dahlan's remarks made clear is that the PLO's recognition of Israel was an optical illusion. Without its constituent factions, the PLO is an empty
shell. And its constituent factions did not recognize Israel. Dahlan then
explained that the Hamas-Fatah government will operate under the same
principle. Hamas will join the PLO. Hamas will form a government with Fatah.
Both terror groups will recognize PLO agreements with Israel and both will
continue to wage war against Israel as Hamas and Fatah - rather than as the
Palestinian government.

It might be thought that Dahlan's admission of premeditated and continuous
bad faith would have elicited a strong reaction from Israel. But no such
thing occurred. Aside from the Jerusalem Post, no Israeli media outlet
mentioned the interview. Neither did any Israeli leftist politician.

And this makes sense. Acknowledging what Dahlan said would require a
parallel Israeli acknowledgement that Israel's strategy for the past 16
years has been based on a complete lie. It would also make Israel even more
unpopular internationally since Fatah is the toast of every town in the
Western world.

It is this state of affairs that must be avoided at all costs with Hamas.
Israel must give no quarter in this debate. And who knows -- if it holds the
line on Hamas while pointing out the significance of Fatah's collusion with
the Iranian proxy, perhaps by the time the next terror campaign inevitably
commences Israel will have finally begun to erode Fatah's international
reputation.

Offense is a position Israel has rarely played since 1993. The Netanyahu
government will have no time to hesitate. It will have to come out attacking
or it will find itself on the outside looking in as the likes of Khaled
Mashaal dine in the West Wing and have tea and crumpets with the Queen.

Caroline Glick is deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Her Jewish
Press-exclusive column appears the last week of each month. Her book "The
Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad," is available at Amazon.com.