Lookie, lookie. The AP has finally discovered what we’ve been saying for years: Hamas will never moderate.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip Oct 14, 2006 (AP)— The U.S. government and Hamas agree on at least one point: More than half a year of economic strangulation of the Palestinian government has yielded no results.
The radical Islamic group, target of a crippling aid boycott since taking power last March, is no closer to moderating itself and no closer to falling.
For Israel, the Palestinians and the international community, time and options are running out with civil war looming in the West Bank and Gaza, poverty soaring and prospects for peacemaking disappearing.
“All the crises that we have been through in the past seven months proved even to the Americans that there is no way that this government is going to fall by economic pressure,” said Abdel Rahman Zeidan, a Cabinet minister in the Hamas-led government.
After seven months, it’s become clear Hamas will not accept the international community’s No. 1 condition for doing business with it: recognizing the Jewish state’s right to exist. And the international community is not about to accept Hamas’s proposed solution: a long-term truce, or “hudna,” while it maintains its goal of eliminating Israel.
It’s also become clear that the person calling the shots in Hamas is not Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh or any other local leader in the West Bank or Gaza. It’s the exiled Khaled Mashaal, the hard-line ideologue sheltered by Syria and funded by Iran.
Yes, but that’s not why it’s failing. This is why:
The international community’s latest strategy to defuse the crisis a $816 million donation from Europe and a new U.S. push to open a Gaza Strip border in time to export this season’s harvest of cherry tomatoes, strawberries and carnations is also fraught with pitfalls.
The initiatives are designed to strengthen the hand of the Palestinians’ moderate president, Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah Party. But they could end up undermining him politically by aligning him with the West in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians. And by easing economic pressure, the moves could also keep Hamas in power.
Gee. Ya think? Forking over nearly a billion dollars in aid to the palestinians, without any conditions on that aid, might make them less willing to make changes to their Israel-hating society?
Shyeah.
You should have included some of the reasons for the resistance those being the Egyptian blind eye to the arms smuggling “tunnels” and Rice’s most stupidly brokered Gaza border agreement in addition to EU monetary gifts.
A plague seems to have been brought down on the Palestinians house.