The post Hamas and Israel: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off appeared first on Jewcy.

Adam LeBor has joined one of the great foreign policy fashions of the moment in calling on the United States and Israel to diplomatically "engage" Hamas. He writes that "without Hamas' agreement — or rather the agreement of part of Hamas's leadership — no peace agreement will be possible in Israel/Palestine." To his credit, LeBor has located the central question at hand, but to his detriment he doesn't seem to realize the implications of it. That question, as Bernard Lewis put it a few days ago, is the following:

If the issue is about the size of Israel, then we have a straightforward border problem, like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas. That is to say, not easy, but possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime.

If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing, and no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether that country should or should not exist.

LeBor, like every engagement fellow-traveler, cannot bring himself to answer the question of whether the conflict is about Israel's borders or its existence, and so LeBor's argument is based on the premise that a "peace agreement" is in the offing, just so long as skillful diplomats can finagle Hamas's consent. LeBor proposes that western diplomats can divide and conquer the organization: "How? By engaging the political realists within the organisation in the political and diplomatic process. By exploiting the growing tensions between the ideologues and pragmatists, that shape every political organisation, even those of radical Islamists who claim a divine mandate."

There is extraordinarily little evidence that such tensions exist, or if they do that they are susceptible to wedge politics. There is an immense paradox to this argument, which simultaneously acknowledges that the isolation of Hamas has begun to create internal division in the organization, but insists that exactly the tactics that are creating such divisions should immediately be ceased. If isolation is grinding the organization down, why stop now? Why not wait another six months, or a year, or however long it takes for Hamas to be truly in internal disarray before attempting diplomacy? In a year's time, wouldn't western diplomats have a great deal more leverage on the organization — and wouldn't that fact make diplomacy, which the engagers say they prefer, all the most promising?

But I'm not so sanguine on the idea that Hamas is susceptible to internal breakdown, or that that is happening right now. The details that LeBor provides in favor of this view are either incomplete, misleading, or simply laughable. He notes that Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, "has called for dialogue with Fatah," accepting Haniyeh's honesty at face value, and never explaining what such a statement has to do with Hamas agreeing to stop its holy war against Israel. It was just over the summer that Haniyeh's organization led a savage military campaign against Fatah immediately after agreeing, in Mecca, to form a unity government with Fatah. Does LeBor really believe that Haniyeh is a serious adherent to the spirit of dialogue? Or might it be possible that people like Haniyeh advocate diplomacy only when it suits their propaganda purposes, and have no intention of keeping their word?

LeBor offers up Ghazi Hamad as the leader of moderate Hamas because of an internal critique he once wrote about the takeover of Gaza. LeBor didn't mention some other words Hamad said recently: "Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer that should be eradicated." The reality of Hamas is that it is thoroughly intolerant of dissent, both within its own organization and in the territory it controls, and operates with an extraordinarily high level of ideological and strategic cohesion.

There is unfortunately not a single example in the history of Hamas in which the organization has permanently moderated its strategy or tactics in response to diplomatic pressure or engagement. LeBor is betting on a fantasy.

Here's another bit of wishful thinking: "For isolation and quarantine is further boosting the radicals, making a long-term solution more unlikely." A comforting thought, but there is really no evidence for this: public opinion polling in Gaza since June shows a significant downward trend in popular support for Hamas. I might also add that the most radical period in Palestinian history came immediately on the heels of the most engagement-heavy period in Palestinian history — the Madrid and Oslo process and then the second Intifada. The period of 1991-2004 makes a very strong case that excessive western engagement on behalf of the Palestinian cause actually radicalized Palestinian opinion by whetting their appetite for victory.

LeBor continues: "Hamas won the elections not because Palestinians in Ramallah and Nablus are dreaming of a new Caliphate, but because the hideously corrupt and chronically inept Fatah could not deliver." There is perhaps a slight bit of truth to this, but there was another much more significant reason why Hamas was so popular in January, 2006: Israel had disengaged from Gaza five months earlier, and the Palestinian people credited Hamas's "resistance" with having forced the Jews out, and duly rewarded them at the ballot box (and for the record, I supported, and still do, the Gaza disengagement).

There was, by the way, a non-Islamist, anti-corruption Palestinian party running in the 2006 election, the Third Way party of Salam Fayyad (the current PA prime minster) and Hanan Ashrawi. It won — drum roll, please — 2.4 percent of the vote. Apologies, friends, but the idea that the Palestinian people voted for Hamas only out of a sense of disgust with corruption is a naive myth, and if we ever wish for the Palestinian electorate to change who it votes for, we cannot make its affection for Islamic imperialism cost-free. In the same way that the citizens of other democracies must live with government they elect, the citizens of Gaza must now live with Hamas. If you believe in Palestinian democracy, you must also believe in holding Palestinians accountable for their electoral choices.

I don't mean in all of this to single out LeBor for criticism. He is articulating a set of views about the conflict that are immensely popular among many westerners, and even among many Israelis. There are a couple of other good reasons for not "engaging" with Hamas, and they are concerned with the wider western effort at encouraging political moderation in the Arab world. The Bush administration, at least before it handed the Israeli-Arab conflict over to the State Department, has been attempting to put its weight behind the idea that radicalism will get the Arabs nowhere — that it will not cause America to support terrorist grievances; that it will not cause America to pressure Israel for concessions; and that it will not win American diplomatic attention. As part of this strategy, America has chosen to support Arab moderates, such as Mahmoud Abbas, who, while problematic, at least do not today publicly call for Israel's destruction. What will be the lesson for the Arab world if the United States undermines the political salience of the moderates by lavishing attention on the radicals? What will become of our effort to bolster Mahmoud Abbas if we suddenly begin conferring legitimacy on Hamas?

One of the larger, subterranean, problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the West has made Palestine a thoroughly disincentive-free zone, in which there are scarcely few examples in which bad behavior, no matter how depraved, antagonistic, or perfidious, is ever punished. The rocket fire from Gaza that is rained down on Israel on a daily basis could be ceased, for example, if the UN and EU made their lavish aid to Gaza contingent on a cessation of Hamas's attacks. It was thus refreshing, at the height of the last intifada, when the Bush administration finally gave up on Yasser Arafat after the Israeli navy intercepted the Karine A smuggling 50 tons of weapons and explosives to the Palestinian Authority. A clear message was sent: America will not help terrorists. That message must continue to be conveyed, consistently and inflexibly. Inviting Hamas to peace conferences that it openly disdains, that it will only use for propaganda purposes, and that will demonstrate to the Palestinian people that terrorism wins an audience with the American president is no way to make peace.

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From reading the New York Times’ review of the Israeli documentary Hot House, an account of Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli jails, one would be left with the impression that Ahlam Tamimi, the smiling young woman featured in a large color portrait atop the story, is a kindhearted person, an anomalous presence behind bars. Her smooth, youthful skin perspires slightly beneath the hijab that frames her face; she is looking into the camera, head tilted slightly, straight white teeth shining, a look of contentment and pride in her eyes. What could someone like her be doing in prison? You wouldn’t know the answer to that question from the photo caption, which reads: “Ahlam Tamimi in a scene from the documentary ‘Hot House.’ Ms. Tamimi is among about 10,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails.” The only reference to her in Neil Genzlinger’s review says, “A former Palestinian newscaster, Ahlam Tamimi, recalls the day she dropped a suicide bomber off at his target, then coolly went on television to report on the resulting bombing.” But this, too, is troublingly incomplete: Tamimi was much more than a simple and perhaps unwitting means of transportation for a suicide bomber. And the suicide bombing in question, which is never mentioned in the review, was one of the most gruesome and deadly of the Intifada: it was the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in downtown Jerusalem that murdered 15 people (17, if one wishes to count the baby being carried by a pregnant woman and another victim who was left in a permanent coma). Eight of the slaughtered were children, a detail that could not have gone unnoticed by Tamimi’s accomplice as he made his way through the crowd of restaurant patrons with an explosives- and shrapnel-packed guitar case slung over his shoulder. Tamimi, who at the time of the attack was a 20-year-old part-time university student from Ramallah, and the bomber, a 22-year-old son of affluent West Bank parents, were members of Hamas. The planning and reconnaissance for the attack were carried out also by Tamimi, and on the day of the attack Tamimi and her accomplice dressed as westerners and spoke English in order to pass through the checkpoints between Arab East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem. In 2006 Tamimi was given a rare opportunity to be interviewed in prison, and declared: “I'm not sorry for what I did. I will get out of prison and I refuse to recognize Israel's existence. Discussions will only take place after Israel recognizes that this is Islamic land.” If the editors of the Times were familiar with the easily-obtainable details of her story but nonetheless chose to present her in the manner they did, they are moral cretins. And if they didn’t bother to investigate the reason for her incarceration, they are more than just poor journalists — they are willfully obtuse ones, reluctant to dig too deeply into a story whose particularities would be troublesome to the aesthetic presentation demanded by the preferred narrative — a narrative captured perfectly when Genzlinger avers that “by the end of ‘Hot House’ you may feel more than a little annoyance at the two sides in this endless conflict. These enemies know each other absurdly well. They learn from each other, and talk openly about doing so. Yet they can’t seem to break the cycle: a cat and mouse addicted to their own game.” Beliefs like this are both cowardly and convenient: They allow journalists to remain ensconced in their preferred moral universe, one in which there is equivalence between terrorist and victim and conflict only continues because of an intransigence, even a thirst for combat, that is shared equally by both sides. I wonder whether the Times editors would portray an abortion clinic bomber or Ku Klux Klan member in the way they have presented Tamimi? Can one even imagine such a photograph of an Israeli settler? In selecting the glowing portrait of Tamimi to accompany the Hot House review, and in neglecting to provide essential context, the Times editors made a judgment about the moral characteristics of the attack: A judgment that if made differently would have demanded a photograph of a disfigured survivor, or a portrait of the shattered visage of parents who will be tortured forever by the unspeakable horror of knowing that their children’s bodies were torn to pieces by the nails and screws of a bomb that was delivered to its target by Ahlam Tamimi — a woman who has been given the opportunity to grin at them satisfyingly by the Times editors. Frimet and Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter was one of Tamimi’s victims, are courageously trying to influence the moral sentiments of people who see Hot House, or who even only read the Times’ coverage of it. Arnold Roth wrote in reaction to the Times’s review: “Neither the New York Times nor HBO are likely to give even a moment's attention to the victims of the barbarians who destroyed the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem and the lives of so many victims. So we would be grateful if you would pass along this link to some pictures of our daughter whose name was Malki. She was unable to reach her twenties — Hamas saw to that. Though she was only fifteen years old when her life was stolen from her and from us, we think Malki was a beautiful young woman, living a beautiful life. We ask your help so that other people — far fewer than the number who will see the New York Times, of course — can know about her. Please ask your friends to look at the pictures — some of the very few we have — of our murdered daughter. They are at http://www.kerenmalki.org/photo.htm. There are more photos of the Sbarro bombing and its victims available here and here. They are disturbing but necessary antidotes to the creeping moral dementia that has infected much of the media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The post The Real Ahlam Tamimi You Didn’t Read About In The Times appeared first on Jewcy.

Iran is indeed a threat to both the United States and to Israel – but the threat does not come in the cartoonish form of Mr. Raimondo's fevered imagination, with Iranian bombers nuking Tel Aviv and Iranian ICBM's rocketing their way toward New York. Those scenarios are red herrings intended to make Raimondo's task of turning America and Israel into the world's leading belligerents much easier.

The actual threat posed by a nuclear Iran involves the manner in which such a development would upset the balance of power in the Middle East, which no doubt for Mr. Raimondo is a boring subject as it does not provide ready opportunities for Israel Lobby hysteria and mushroom cloud fantasies. To understand the consequences of a nuclear Iran, we have to look to the recent history of Middle East power arrangements.

Before the American-Israeli alliance was solidified in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the Middle East — especially the eastern Mediterranean half of it — was home to regular warfare. This bloodshed arose from the conviction among the Arab nations that they could destroy Israel, which they tried to do repeatedly: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Even though some of the Arab countries were allied with the Soviet Union, Israel repulsed the invaders, and in the latter two wars even captured territory from the attacking armies. In doing so Israel created for itself a reputation as the most militarily competent country in its half of the region.

And then, as Martin Kramer explains, "the United States began to look at Israel as a potential strategic ally. Israel appeared to be the strongest, most reliable and most cost-effective bulwark against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. It could defeat any combination of Soviet clients on its own and, in so doing, humiliate the Soviet Union and drive thinking Arabs out of the Soviet camp."

In contrast to the benefits that Israel's victories provided the United States in its maneuverings against the Soviets, the 1973 war did create something of a crisis for America, in the form of the Arab oil embargo. Having suffered a gasoline shortage at home, American strategists decided to attempt to impose peace in the region by showing so much support for Israel that the Arab states would henceforth refuse to challenge it. And this strategy has been a resounding success: Since 1973 there have been no more wars between Israel and Arab countries. This security arrangement even ended up prying Egypt away from the Soviets and into an alliance, later joined by Jordan, with America.

What does all of this have to do with Iran today? It has to do with the Islamic Republic's prospects for success in its endeavor to undermine this American-enforced security architecture. Iran is trying to destabilize the Middle East by creating its own set of alliances and clients that it hopes will rival America's. This is why it funds Hezbollah in Lebanon and now Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories; has cultivated an alliance with Syria that seeks to engulf Lebanon and allow Hezbollah free reign there; and provides weapons, money, and leadership to insurgents in Iraq.

Iran's intentions are clear: it wants America out of the Middle East, so that it can control the Persian Gulf and manipulate the rest of the region through its alliances and proxies. Are these goals going to be easier or harder to accomplish with the benefit of nuclear deterrence? The answer is obvious, and it is the real reason why preventing a nuclear Iran is both in the American and Israeli interest. The short-term stakes, though, are higher for Israel (and Lebanon, for that matter). A nuclear Iran allied with Hezbollah to the north and Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the Southwest and East would dramatically embolden Israel's enemies, suppress foreign investment and tourism in Israel, and over time would cause the economic and psychological attrition of the Jewish state — with no bombing runs over Tel Aviv necessary.

And so the true disappointment of Israel's war against Hezbollah last summer was its failure to act as a competent American client by dominating the part of the region it is responsible for keeping quiet. The war against Hezbollah was a particularly important conflict for Israel to win, because Hezbollah is more than just another disruptive presence in the Levant — it is a vanguard force in the Iranian arsenal that is attempting to make American involvement in the region as costly as possible. It is one of the means by which Iran can summon a counterattack should the U.S. or Israel strike its nuclear facilities, and it is the primary asset of the Syrian-Iranian project to co-opt Lebanon, defeat the American-allied nascent democracy there, and bring uncontested Iranian power to Israel's northern border.

In one of his many dumb asides, Raimondo says that people who favor preventing Iran, by force if necessary, from acquiring nuclear weapons "don't have any compunction about throwing the entire region into chaos." This is probably the most wrong-headed of his many ridiculous assertions. Western acquiescence to a nuclear Iran would do perhaps more than anything else to throw the Middle East into chaos. It would shatter the balance of power that has governed the region, however shakily, for nearly forty years. Second-tier powers, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, would be sent scrambling for their own nuclear weapons and new alliances, and the United States would almost certainly be forced from the region. Raise your hand if you're in favor of handing over control of the U.S. economy to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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