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| A sharpshooter's T-shirt printed for members of the Shaked Battalion of the IDF's Givati Infantry Brigade. |
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| A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers faces Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day in the mainly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, occupied East Jerusalem (Ahmad Gharabli AFP/Getty). |
I posted this a week ago but I'll post it again.
A liberal Zionist debates a conservative and concedes democracy is too much to ask. Peter Beinart
[The Atlantic recut the piece archive.org ]
I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state.In the comments on Bertram's post I also linked to this, quoting from the interview linked in the second part of the post. When he deleted my comments he deleted most of the substantive information in the thread. How many times can you supply data and history and have it be ignored without anger?
Well, they started squeezing Hamas almost immediately. Originally, in the weeks right after the late-January election, Hamas wanted to form a relatively moderate government that would include a large number of political "independents" under the leadership of Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh as Prime Minister. But as I know-- because I was the conduit of one of these threats-- threats of lethal violence were sent by the Israelis to any Palestinian "independents" who might be even considering joining a Haniyeh-led government. As a result, none of them did; and the government that Haniyeh ended up forming was 100% Hamas.She adds this in comments
I have written about it before. It was Ziad. The threat was conveyed to me by Ziad's and my mutual friend Ze'ev Schiff, a decent man who had been extremely close to successive generations of the leaders of Israel's security establishment for half a century before his death last year.
To be specific, when I spoke with Ze'ev on the phone before I went to Gaza in March 2006-- and he did help me to get in-- he asked if I was going to see Ziad, who was then widely reported to be considering an offer from Hamas to be Haniyeh's Foreign Minister (as he subsequently became, during the brief life of the 2007 national unity government.) I said yes. He said-- and he repeated this a couple of times to make sure I got the meaning clear-- that I should tell Ziad he would face "the worst possible consequences" if he joined the Haniyeh government, and that he said this "on good authority."
I did pass the message on to Ziad.
Ziad also faced considerable family-based pressure from the Americans since his three children from his first marriage were at college here in the US, and I suppose if he had joined the Haniyeh government and then tried to visit them here he could be arraigned on all kinds of charges of aiding and abetting terrorists. But Ze'ev's words about "the worst possible consequences" struck me as constituting a more severe and immediate threat.
Err... Isn't there a context missing from this?
ReplyDeleteAs Hamas was in a declared state of war with Israel, a war of annihlation as dictated by their "covenant"; which they have never contemplated amending - any member of their Government would immediately become an open enemy of Israel and a legitimate military target?
Wouldn't this explain Ze'ev Schiff's warning and quite rightly so?
Hamas had an opportunity to become a responsible leader and Government for the Palestinian people. All they had to do was amend their "covenant" to remove the openly racist and imperialist Islamist frothing about Jews and Andalusia and they might have changed EVERYTHING.
But they didn't. And anybody, however moderate, who joined a Government committed to such a racist and imperialist "covenant", would be signing up to this statement of principle.
Ziad should have insisted he wouldn't consider joining a Hamas Government until they amended the "covenant". Not only on moral principal but even basic political expediency. While the "covenant" exists as it is, Israel, nor anyone with sense, can see Hamas as anything but a murderous, Imperialist bunch of psychotic racist thugs. It's right there in their constitution!
I'll make this relatively brief and I don't want to continue.
ReplyDeleteActions are more important than words. Hamas has held to truces that Israel has not. It has tried recently to focus it's homemade rockets on military targets. Ask Daniel Levy. Israel continues expansionist policies. It allowed Hamas to grow as a force against secular Fatah while deporting Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist. It recently kidnapped and tortured a leader of non-violent protest, Ameer Makhoul.
Still, Hamas has made implicit acknowledgment of Israel along the '67 borders.
The war is an Israeli war of aggression. Israeli policy governs the lives implicitly or explicitly of 5,5 million Palestinians in the name of the preservation and expansion of a Jewish State that for that very reason, even within it's older borders, could not be called a democracy. Read Beinart again (if you have even once) the new hero of the Zionist moderates.
I do not defend states not based on citizenship. I do not defend an ethnic German state. The French constitution does not recognize a French ethnicity. I defend the equal protection of the law to every member of a community. Zionists to not. When Israelis accept that their presence in Palestine is a moral fact but was never a moral ideal, there will be real progress. Zionist liberals still defend the ideal. The best and also the worst that can be said is that they're lying to themselves before they lie to the rest of us.
Shimon Peres to Dr. E.M. Rhoodie in 1974:
Cooperation between Israel and S. Africa is “based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.”
Nobody has denied the authenticity of that letter.
That the victims of an ongoing crime have to struggle to reach moral parity to their oppressor is a testament to the guilt of the world for the crimes of the past.
Stop lying to yourself and don't lie to me. I have no patience,
You keep referring to words, not to actions.
ReplyDeleteI listed actions. I don't defend Hamas' ideology, but their actions have been politically both serious and rational. While you ignore both Israeli ideology and actions. Israel is the irrational actor in this, in a 40 year war of aggression.
"Hamas had an opportunity to become a responsible leader and Government for the Palestinian people." Yes, when they won the election. But Fatah, Israel and the US moved against them and the will of the Palestinian people. It's in the links, Fully documented. You can't tell people you're attacking how to defend themselves, or whom to elect. You have no right to demand that niggers act like saints while your own kind are merely human. If you want non-violent protest as an alternative, stop torturing non-violent protesters.
Uri Avnery: "After all, it is no secret that it was the Israeli government which set up Hamas to start with. When I once asked a former Shin-Bet chief, Yaakov Peri, about it, he answered enigmatically: 'We did not create it, but we did not hinder its creation.' ”
But Avnery still says the Jews want to live alone.
That's a really guilty xenophobe.
And you seem to defend the Reconquista. Maybe you should look up the Edict of Expulsion, of the Jews from Spain.
Are you saying that when Hamas writes an indeological covenant promising to cleanse all Muslim lands of Jews, and reclaim Andulsia in the name of Islam, all prepatory to an inevitable war of annhilation in which all muslims have a holy duty to kill Jews (and other infidels) - that they don't actually mean it?
ReplyDeleteSO why say it?
BTW - I'm not defending anything. Just pointing out that Hamas is not a national liberation movement. It's an Islamist imperialist movement. They are two very different things.
There is no mention of Andalusia in the Hamas Charter. Perhaps you were referring to the second paragraph here:
ReplyDelete"Initially Hamas and other militant groups, drunk on their self-claimed success in forcing Israel’s departure, sought to fight their way out with projectiles. The number of mostly home-made rockets hitting Israel rose from 281 in 2004 to 1,750 in 2008; and their range rose from a few kilometres to reach Tel Aviv’s outskirts. But stung by the ferocity of Israel’s reprisals, most lethally in the January 2009 war, Hamas reined in its fire and forced others to do likewise. So far this year 34 rockets have landed in Israel, none launched by Hamas. “Hamas is defending Israel,” chuckles an Israeli foreign ministry official.
Instead Hamas has turned its energies inward. With Gazans locked inside the 40km by 10km (154 square-mile) strip, the siege has given Hamas a free hand to mould the place. Its leaders liken Gaza to a ribat, a warrior monastery, and its inmates to murabitoun, or militant monks, recalling the 11th-century revivalist movement which withdrew to the Moroccan highlands before sweeping onto the Moroccan plains and Andalusia. They regale the struggle to survive with the same terminology they once used for fighting Israel. To ensure supplies they created a “resistance” economy, supervising the digging of an elaborate web of tunnels snaking under Gaza’s border with Egypt."
The Charter. It calls for the destruction of Israel.
Here's Jeremy Greenstock who argues that it was not adopted as a platform of the governing Hamas administration in Gaza. The Charter was written in 1988. A lot has changed since then, but Hamas are still holding to their core definition: a national resistance. Here's Khalid Mishal on Charlie Rose
Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are Al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia is more of a danger, but they are Israel's parter in extremism and hate. They need each other.
Your efforts here are counterproductive for you I think.