Soccer Dad

Accepting the unacceptable

On Sept 14, 1993 the editors of the Washington Post opined in "A Handshake for Peace:

A myth has arisen from the recent Mideast dazzle to the effect that Israel and the PLO could have made peace years and even decades ago. It seems so natural and plausible and fated now. But this is to ignore the deep sources of their animosity and rivalry. It trivializes the Israeli-Palestinian dispute not to realize that it was real and irreducible: two peoples, one land. Only when the two had exhausted the quest for unilateral advantage could they begin to explore mutual accommodation. It took courage, and there were policy errors aplenty, but it took time and experience and blood too.

The Palestinian side needs quick relief from occupation and a start on development. The Israeli side needs a quick ending to the intifada and effective PLO checks on terrorism. That's just for openers. Mr. Arafat anxiously catalogued some of the most troubling, other issues - Jerusalem, Israel's West Bank settlers, Palestinian refugees, boundaries - which his constituents expect him to deliver on. Israel's claims for security and regional acceptance weigh no less heavily on Mr. Rabin.

All tough, but all possible to do in the now-shared Israeli- Palestinian view. This is the new excitement. It becomes the more credible when one listens hard to what Israelis and Palestinians now are saying to each other. Israel's security, Mr. Arafat said, rests on "putting an end to {the Palestinians'} feelings of having been wronged and of having suffered a historic injustice." A new chapter opens, said Mr. Rabin, "in the sad book of our lives together." The language anyway sounds as if these are people serious about peace.

In "A free Palestinian Vote" on Jan 22, 1996 the Post's editors opined:

THE WEEKEND Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza were a major success. The reported instances of funny business, including Israeli pressure to limit voting in Arab East Jerusalem, did not keep the vote from being the most democratic Arab poll anywhere ever. The turnout surpassed even the rosiest predictions and itself constituted a vote of confidence in the political process, notwithstanding an announced Islamic boycott.

Nationalist leader Yasser Arafat, running without real opposition, swept to a landslide victory. He becomes chairman of a new Palestinian self-rule council -- a historic first that puts Palestinians closer than they have ever been to establishing a state of their own. His Fatah movement appears to have dominated voting for an 88-member legislature covering two-thirds of the land and virtually every Palestinian resident -- but not the Israeli settlements -- of the West Bank and Gaza.

A tension rests at the heart of this effort to extend the limited Gaza-Jericho autonomy regime to the whole Arab-populated West Bank. The first Israeli purpose is to strengthen Yasser Arafat as a partner and not only to be able to put into effect the autonomy terms already negotiated. Israelis also want him to be able to negotiate the tough remaining questions of a full Israeli-Palestinian peace -- refugees, boundaries, settlements, Jerusalem. Security for its own citizens is necessarily an Israeli preoccupation. Israelis count on Mr. Arafat to do his part in this hard task.

Today they held forth with "Palestinians' Risky Elections":

Having prescribed democracy as an essential condition for a Palestinian state, the Bush administration can hardly stand in the way of electoral participation by a movement that represents a large fraction of Palestinians. It must hope that Hamas eventually will embrace democracy as the sole means of advancing its agenda, rather than as a mere tool to prevent its own disarmament or any Palestinian concessions to Israel, and that it will feel obliged to moderate its tactics and agenda while serving in government. Whether or not that happens, a Palestinian Authority backed by Hamas may be able to restore a semblance of order to Gaza. In the dismal present circumstances, that would be a step forward.

Having prescribed strengthening the "moderate" Palestinians for the better part of the past twelve years (if not longer) the editors of the Washington Post are now telling the U.S. and Israel to tolerate the extremists and hope that they come around.

This is skewed thinking as the moderates were never really that moderate. And they weren't open to change. Recently Evelyn Gordon correctly noted that "Fatah is no better than Hamas":

... Barghouti is not first on the list because his popularity forced a reluctant Abbas to accept him, but because Abbas deliberately decided to head the list with someone convicted of murdering Israelis. And whether he did so because he personally admires such killers or merely because he deemed this necessary to win votes makes little difference in terms of the prospects for peace: Even if Abbas personally wants to end the conflict, that is unlikely to happen if the Palestinian public prefers terrorism.

Indeed, most of the Fatah list is one long paean to terrorism. Barghouti is No. 1. Yatta is No. 2. No. 3 is Umm Jihad, whose claim to fame is being the widow of another famous terrorist, Abu Jihad. And so on and so forth.
THEN, FINALLY, there is Abbas himself - who, for all his anti-terrorist rhetoric, has facilitated terror rather than fighting it.

Ever since the disengagement, for instance, Kassam rockets have been launched from Gaza into Israel almost daily. The main culprits are Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, both of which are small organizations that lack broad popular backing, and would therefore be easy targets for the tens of thousands of armed PA security personnel in Gaza.

Yet Abbas refused to order his forces into action, allowing the launches to continue unmolested. Only last week, after Israel decided to try to protect its southern towns itself by using air force and artillery to turn popular launch sites into "no-go zones," did Abbas finally move - not against the terrorists, but against Israel. Declaring that Israel "has no right to return [to Gaza] under any pretext, including the firing of rockets," he began trying to mobilize international pressure against the Israeli operation.

The Palestinian elections are not perilous because of how the outcome will effect Palestinians. It is because the outcome will once again result in Israel being forced to tolerate a new threat on its border.

First Israel had to allow the PLO to establish a government. That experiment failed. Now Israel might well be pressured to allow a more implacable (if also more honest) foe to form a government on its borders as a way of promoting ... democracy? The slow but relentless push for Israel to concede ever more to its enemies is totally perverse. It has led to even more terror and violence in the past and gives little reason to expect otherwise in the future.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish responds to the editorial with a dismissive:

So let me see if I get this straight: The PA is corrupt. Hamas is not. Hamas may kinda sorta possibly stop being terrorists once they assume public office. Do we have any evidence for that?

Boker Tov Boulder has no patience for the Post's misplaced wishful thinking, she simply refers to the definition of Hamas:

HAMAS is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement. It was founded in 1988 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and an alternative to the more secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The Hamas describes itself as "a distinct Palestinian Movement which owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine." Clear enough?

Noahpinion (located via Technorati) offers one possible (perverse) reason that a Hamas victory could be good:

If Hamas, which is widely recognized as Israel's most prolific and extreme terror group (pace Palestinian Islamic Jihad), wins the election, then the entire world will know that the Palestinian population largely supports terrorism. This will take the wind out of the sails of those who draw a sort of moral equivalence between Palestine and Israel regardless of the actions of either one; when faced with an Israeli government ready to unilaterally uproot Jewish settlements opposite a Palestinian government headed by a terror group, world powers like Europe (and Palestine's backers in the U.S.) will be forced to be more sympathetic to the democratic, U.S.-allied Israel.

In context puts the false hopes of the Washington Post, um, in context:

Did the political ascendancy of Hizbullah in Lebanon represent the sort of "step forward" that the Washington Post envisions will result from a Hamas victory (or even participation) in tomorrow's elections? Is it an attractive model? If the men who once kidnapped and murdered Western diplomats in Gaza are next year inviting Westerners to tour the ruins of Gush Katif, so what if they're also launching rocket attacks and mortar shells into the Negev and Askelon and suicide bombers into Beersheva and Tel Aviv?

The same myopia that led Middle East "experts" back in 1996 (five years before 9-11) to predict that the wave of Islamic militancy had already crested is today guiding the editors of one of America's most influential newspapers. Read it and weep.

Technorati Tags: Palestinian elections/a>, Israel, Hamas.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.