There is no question -- none -- that Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza is justified. No nation can tolerate a portion of its people living in the conditions of the London Blitz -- listening for sirens, sleeping in bomb shelters and separated from death only by the randomness of a Qassam missile's flight. And no group aspiring to nationhood, such as Hamas, can be exempt from the rules of sovereignty, morality and civilization, which, at the very least, forbid routine murder attempts against your neighbors.Correct on the first point, missed on the second. Yes, Israel's elimination of Hamas' rocket threat is justified. But, no, sorry - Hamas does not "aspire" to nationhood. Hamas is entirely uninterested in creating a nation out of Gaza or the West Bank and Gaza combined.
Mr. Gerson has apparently fallen into the fallacy that the rulers of the Palestinian people desire for the "peace process" to work just as its Western proponents envision. That is the "two state solution" for which the objective is a Jewish state of Israel and an independent Palestinian state of the West Bank and Gaza, with the Bank being, finally, free of Israeli presence and most (or all) of the Jewish settlements that have been built there over the years.
This is in fact exactly what the Olmert government and its immediate predecessors have sought since at least the last decade. It is exactly what then Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to under the sponsorship of the Bill Clinton administration. In July 2000 at Camp David, Barak agreed to literally 95 percent of the demands made by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasir Arafat. In response, Arafat walked out of the conference and went back to the West Bank.
No one who has ever exercised political authority among the Palestinians has ever committed to a two-state solution. Under Arafat, and continuing today, the future Palestinian state is envisioned entirely as extending across the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and all of Israel. Israel, as a Jewish state, governed by the Western traditions of democracy, must vanish from history and its land "returned" to the Arabs.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."It is important to understand that the elimination of Israel as an independent Jewish state is also the goal of Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a confederation of anti-Israel groups brought together by Yasir Arafat in the 1960s. The present Palestinian Authority (PA) grew out of the PLO as a result of the Oslo Accords of 1993, which was yet another Western-sponsored attempt to move toward implementing the two-state solution. Fatah still thrives as a political and militia group in the West Bank. In fact, apart from Fatah there would be no Palestinian Authority."The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
The only difference between Hamas and Fatah/PA is one of tactics, not of objectives. Hamas is founded on violent jihad against Israel and in theory and practice has no use for conferencing or diplomacy. This is not conjecture; Hamas has stated it plainly. Hamas only strategy is warfare against Israel.
Fatah, on the other hand, is more willing to bide its time and use the so-called peace process to advance its goals. It is probably even willing to accept a two-state solution as a temporary measure from which to gain strength, influence and international legitimacy to advance the elimination of Jewish Israel and subsume it into a future, Muslim greater Palestine.
The civil war that Hamas and Fatah fought beginning in 2006, peaking in mid-2007, was not over differences in ultimate objectives, but over, mainly, who would rule the Palestinians and by what means their common objectives would be achieved.
The Fatah map, above, represents completely the goal of both Hamas and Fatah. That is the nationhood both factions aspire to. (Gerson's op-ed is very good, btw, read the whole thing.)