Israel won’t actively try to stop Hamas from running in the PA elections.
JERUSALEM (AP) – Israel has dropped its campaign to ban the violent Islamic Hamas from Palestinian parliamentary elections, admitting defeat after President Bush pointedly skipped repeating the demand in a public appearance with the Palestinian leader last week.
Israel says it is still strongly opposed to Hamas participation, because its charter calls for destruction of the Jewish state, but it will take no steps to stop it.
“Are we going to go to war on this issue or interfere on this issue? No,” a senior official said Sunday.
Also, Israel said if Hamas took part in the Palestinian government, there would be no hope for peace talks. That threat still hangs in the air.
“This organization will not be a legitimate partner for peace,” said one official. “It’s Hamas or us.”
During the last five years, Hamas has carried out dozens of suicide bombing attacks which have killed hundreds of Israelis. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make official policy statements.
When a government says they will refuse to deal with an organization that allows terrorists into its midst, I’m not clear on why that should be called a threat. But then, I’m not an AP writer or editor.
On the other hand, they actually blamed Hamas for the murders of hundreds of Israelis with no weasel words attached. And the article does contain these two paragraphs:
When Abbas was in Washington, Palestinian gunmen killed three Israelis in a drive-by shooting in the West Bank, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, linked to Abbas’ Fatah, claimed responsibility.
[…] Previous efforts to disarm Al Aqsa have ended in failure. An offer by the Palestinian government to buy weapons from militants fizzled, and earlier programs to give gunmen posts in security services have not yielded significant results.
Since Al Aqsa is close to Fatah, failure to bring its gunmen into the official fold would bode ill for similar efforts toward Hamas, the main Fatah rival.
Gee. They’re almost making sense. I think we’ll track this article and see how much it changes.