Ze’ev Schiff has written a lengthy analysis of the current situation with Hamas, and how Israel can deal with the various scenarios. It’s rather a depressing read, but then, the situation has been rather depressing for the last forty years.
While Israel and the United States are trying to figure out what strategy to use vis-a-vis Hamas, the movement has already come up with a clear strategy of its own. However, Hamas is still trying to figure out which tactic to use. The assessment among Israel’s leaders is that decisions in principle have to be made as quickly as possible. The trouble is that Israel has no vision at all with regard to Hamas – that is, it is not clear how Israel sees the future, even if Hamas should fail in leading the Palestinian Authority.
Read it all.
I find Schiff’s “analysis” incomprehensible.
He should have stopped after the portion that I bolded. The most recent election, with its record-low turnout and spectacular fragmentation (no one party won even a quarter of Knesset seats), demonstrates the absence of any coherent national vision. Of course, when Schiff wrote “Israel” he meant “Kadima” (except when he mentioned the IDF). It should be no surprise that that, in a nation without a coherent vision, the most successful politicial party reflects (nay, embodies) that impairment.
And what would have been required of Israel to help the old FATAH leadership succeed? Mahmoud Abbas demanded (and continues to demand) the very same things that HAMAS now demand in exchange for an indeterminate truce: dismantlement of all “settlements,” withdrawal of forces to the Green Line and an end to incursions and “targeted killings,” release of all “political prisoners,” dismantlement of the “apartheid wall” and the “humiliating” checkpoints, an end to the “Judaizing” of Jerusalem, and recognition of the “right of return” of the “refugees.”
We already know that Israel is better off for having lost control of the Gaza-Egypt border (which has allowed the infiltration of Gaza by al Qaeda and the smuggling of Katyushas and Strellas), and for having brought strategic industrial areas in Ashkelon within rocket range? One may sincerely believe that the trade-offs involved in “occupation” do not favor Israel, but only the spectacularly arrogant can claim to know it.
Note that the cost of disengagement entailed far more than security issues that might be redressed via re-occupation. The Sharon/Olmert initiative in Gaza reinforced Israel’s adversaries’ belief in the efficacy of terror, dismantled vibrant agricultural communities and turned their inhabitants into unemployed refugees, exacerbated divisions within Israeli society, and undermined respect for Israel’s democratic institutions. Re-occupation of Gaza would not heal those self-inflicted wounds.
Although I was a skeptic about the disengagement and remain one today, but I cannot (despite the above litany) even claim to “know” that disengagement was an error. A fortiori, and in contrast to Schiff’s certainty on the other side, I cannot be confident that re-occupation would be a wise course.
In the long run, I believe that peace (defined other than in terms of Israel’s destruction) would require nothing short of a refashioning of “Palestinian Arab” national identity along the lines of Arafat’s January 1998 letter repudiating the portions of the PLO charter that deny the legitimacy of Zionism as a national movement and Judaism’s religious and historical ties to the land. No Palestinian Arab leader has emerged to champion the perspective inherent in that letter, and looking for such a figure to make his (or her) appearance on the stage feels more like “Waiting for Godot” with each passing day. HAMAS does not in any way repudiate the anti-Zionist essence of Palestinian Arab national identity, but merely reframes it by adding a religious dimension.
Reading Haaretz (part of the blame Israel first crowd)is always a gloomy ordeal.
Haaretz seems to think that there was a Palestinian leadership that Israel could negotiate with. The only leadership that they could have negotiated with would have been over their own suicide.
There is nothing Israel can do to advance peace between herself and the Arabs. The hatred of the Arabs for Israel and the Jews, reinforced by decades of vicious antisemitic propagand from their governments, means that they will accept only Israel’s defeat and the genocide of the Jewish population.
It is evident now that the real mistake was at Oslo, as Norman Podhoretz and some others said at the time. The depth of Arab hatred is measured by the fact that this was too much for many of them, even though Arafat told them it was a Treaty of Hudabiyya and not meant seriously. The Palis have never acted in good faith. They should not be expected to do so in the future, no matter who is sitting on top of the greasy pole of Pali politics.