Soccer Dad: Suicide post mortem

April 21, 2006

Suicide post mortem

The Washington Post is frustrating. Unlike the editors of the New York Times who live in some other world, the Post's editors seem to live in the real world. (For example, see Mediacrity's Hamas P.R. Miracle Continues about the Times editorial "The Face of Hamas.")

The Post's editors are liberal, no doubt. But usually they possess an element of intellectual honesty. That is unless the issue is Israel. Then they possess the same unreal otherworldliness that the editors of the Times Possess. Let's look at "Suicide Rhetoric."

HAMAS FACED its first concrete choice this week between its ambition to govern the West Bank and Gaza and its extremist commitment to terrorism -- and it chose to side with the suicide bombers. The sickening Passover attack at a Tel Aviv restaurant Monday, which killed nine Israelis and injured dozens, was carried out by Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed extremist group that refuses to observe the shaky cease-fire Hamas has followed for more than a year. Yet, though the attack violated its own policy and undermined its interests, several of Hamas's spokesmen quickly defended it. The result was to put the Palestinian government on record as an outlaw and to raise dangerously the chances of a major new outbreak of Middle East violence.

Good for the Post's editors for understanding that Hamas chose wrong. But there's still an awful lot wrong with this paragraph.

For one thing calling Islamic Jihad "an Iranian backed extremist group" is a way of calling it illegitimate. The problem is that the exact same description would be an apt one for Hamas.

Second to credit Hamas with "a shaky cease fire" is giving it too much credit. Hamas has offered a lull in attacks, but there's nothing noble about it. Here's Michael Herzog

Some observers detect signs that Hamas is already evolving in a moderate direction. They point to its very willingness to engage in elections and enter the Palestinian Legislative Council, an institution born from the Oslo peace process, which the group has long rejected; its acceptance of a temporary truce (tahdiya) with Israel; its expressed willingness to consider a longer cease-fire (hudna) should Israel withdraw to its 1967 borders; and various statements by Hamas leaders that exhibit flexibility.

There is, however, overwhelming evidence pointing in the opposite direction. For example, Mahmoud al-Zahar, the group's leading figure, gave a series of interviews in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in which he explained that the group sees noconnection between the elections and the Oslo process�which is dead anyway�and that any cease-fire along the 1967 borders would not come with a recognition of Israel or relations with it, but would be merely a step in the continued struggle. "Some Israelis think that when we talk of the West Bank and Gaza it means we have given up our historic war," Zahar told an Israeli newspaper in late October. "This is not the case." As for Hamas' stance on democracy, Zahar's words have been equally discouraging: he proclaimed, "We will join the Legislative Council with our weapons in our hands," later adding, "In the Islamist Palestinian state, every citizen will be required to act in accordance with the codes of Islamic religious law"�not exactly a Western vision of how democracy should function.

Only the most willfully blind at this point would ascribe goodwill to Hamas, but that is exactly what the Post's editors do. The point is that the attack has not undermined Hamas's interests, it has furthered them. It has killed Jews. And the trail doesn't go back to Hamas (directly).

Just before the bombing Qatar announced a $50 million pledge, adding to $50 million already promised by Iran and an unspecified "emergency" grant by Russia. That still falls short of the monthly payroll -- and now both Russia and Qatar, as well as every other Arab League state, should have second thoughts. Russia is still a member of the Middle East "quartet," which has called on Hamas to disarm and recognize Israel; Qatar is a close U.S. ally that wants to be perceived as one of the region's modernizers. The Bush administration should use its leverage to stop both from paying up.

This is good advice. No quibble here. The weak link here, is, unfortunately, the Bush adminstration.

However they go off track again

Hamas's position will also justify tough new measures by Israel, which cannot be expected to accept a neighboring government's open embrace of suicide bombers who attack its cities. The Israeli army already wages a ruthless but narrowly targeted war against Islamic Jihad and has killed a score of its members in the past several months while arresting hundreds of others. A separate campaign of artillery barrages and airstrikes is aimed at suppressing rocket launches into Israel from the Gaza Strip, which are being carried out by several Palestinian factions. Yesterday the Israeli cabinet reportedly decided to refrain from renewing military action against Hamas itself. But if more suicide bombers succeed in the coming days and weeks with Hamas's support, this restraint will surely be abandoned.

Israel's campaign against those who seek to destroy it is "ruthless." And "restraint" seems to equal Israel's absorbing terror attacks without responding. The moral viewpoint here is so skewed that it defies comment.

Hamas has hoped to maintain relative peace with Israel so that it can attract foreign support and deliver on its promises of good government to Palestinian voters. Western governments have calculated that by starving the Islamists of funding, they can force them to recognize Israel and give up terrorism, or cause their rejection by Palestinians.

Hamas may want to attract foreign support, but it's main goal is to have the freedom to recharge and re-arm until it can fight Israel more effectively. "Good government" was always a dodge. Hopefully suspending aid to the Islamists of Hamas will teach them that there are consequences to their actions. It won't get them to accept Israel's right to exist.

Now those strategies stand to be overtaken by the enduring Middle East cycle of terrorism and retaliation. Hamas will be the biggest loser if such a war erupts; it also has the ability to avert it, by rejecting the terrorism of Islamic Jihad and acting to prevent it. Though it has been in power for less than three weeks, Hamas's time is fast running out.

Hamas will lose out if Israel retaliates effectively. But the problem isn't Israeli retaliation, but the toleration of Palestinian terror against Israel since 1964. And for the Post to be scolding Hamas for acting against its own interests at this point is beside the point. The Post has supported the assent of Hamas, pretending that responsibility would moderate it. There was never any evidence of Hamas's moderation. (Nor was there of Arafat's, but that's another story.) Let's look at the record in recent months.

Back in September the Post had a good start with "Bad Start in Gaza". Among other useful points the editorial argued

This week's events further undermine the claim of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he can impose democratic rule of law in Gaza without directly confronting armed extremist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mr. Abbas keeps declaring that only Palestinian security forces will be allowed weapons and that "no one is above the law." But he also keeps shrinking from confronting the gunmen who have been parading through former Jewish settlements or punching holes in the border fence between Gaza and Egypt.

Back then, Hamas was a group to confronted and later in the editorial to be dismantled. But such clearheadedness didn't last long at the Post. A few months later the Post wrote in A Vote for Hamas?

For the United States, the handling of Hamas is inseparable from a regional policy of democratization that, in its essence, is about channeling Islamic movements into electoral politics and away from terrorism. The strategy won't work if the Islamists refuse to give up terrorism, but it will also fail if, in countries such as Lebanon and Egypt as well as in the Palestinian territories, Islamic parties are prohibited from peaceful political competition. Perhaps that's why the administration so far has gingerly separated itself from Israel on this issue.

But there's a false assumption here. Hamas wasn't simply "an Islamic Party" it was and is a terrorist group. There was no reason not to prohibit it from running as a political party. Unfortunately President Bush betrayed his own principles and heeded those who agreed with the Post. (The Post has a similar blindness towards Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, seeing it as simply an Islamic party.)
The Post reiterated this nonsense in February in Democracy's Consequences

While the consequences of the Palestinian vote remain highly uncertain, this rush to condemnation is nonsensical. It ignores the collapse of authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip before the elections, and it ignores the opportunity democracy created to remedy it.

There was nothing uncertain about the result of the Palestinian vote. The Washington Post spent the better part of a year since Hamas won a number of local elections painting Hamas as bunch of policy wonks who wanted nothing more than to get the trains running on time.

But that doesn't excuse the Post or its editors from failing to take Hamas's rhetoric seriously. This happened with Arafat where his rhetoric was regularly dismissed and he was absolved of any responsibility for terror because he said just the right words at the right time in English. Now that it's in government, Hamas isn't as savvy and there seem to be fewer willing to give them the chance.

But Hamas's ascendency is not the result Fatah's of incompetence or corruption. It is the consequence of a prevaling attitude in the West to identify the nature of Palestinian nationalism as a struggle for independence. It must be comforting to believe that trading land for peace will solve the Arab-Israel conflict. Then the problem is solvable.

If the problem is the inadmissability of Israel's existence no matter what Israel does, the conflict doesn't have an easy solution. Certainly not in our time. Or it may be intractable.

As much as the Post is appalled by Israeli retaliations - actions it would deny no other country - it fails to appreciate the role it has played in excusing and legitimizing the terror of Fatah and now Hamas. If Arafat had been held accountable for terror from 1996, the Palestinians might have been forced to accept Israel. But they learned that Arafat could talk peace to the world and war to them and get away with it. When he was no longer around, the Palestinians chose the group that articulated his vision of a world without Israel the best - Hamas.

In its recent editorial the Post sought to absolve the Palestinians from the blame

Faced with an empty treasury and more than 140,000 civil servants and police officers who have not been paid this month, the Islamic movement's foreign minister has been touring capitals in search of funding.

It isn't Hamas's foreign minister, he is the foreign minister of the Palestinian people who without coercion voted a terrorist movement into power. To deny Palestinian culpability once again shows that the Post hasn't learned a thing.

Technorati tags: Israel, Hamas, Palestinian Authority.