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.)
On the contrary, what Hamas has is exactly a nation-- the Palestinians are a people forged in the crucible of shared experience and struggle against Israel since 1948. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone happens to sympathize with them, or support them, or want them to win or to die or to give up or to make peace. Hamas has about half of them.
What Hamas does not have is a nation-state because there is no viable state entity to be made of the Gaza Strip (nor of the West Bank, nor even the combination of them) worthy of the name.
There are only two stable solutions to the Israel/Palestine problem. Israel could return to the status quo ante 1967 by returning Gaza to Egyptian rule and the West Bank to Jordanian rule, thereafter holding those countries responsible for acts of war committed from those territories. Alternately, Israel could expel Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai, pushing them far enough from the Israeli borders that they could not launch rocket attacks into Israel, and repeat as needed. The first is precluded by the fact that Jordan and Egypt do not want to regain control of those territories, because of their fights with Islamist militants in the past (Jordan's "Black September" and Egypt's struggles since the Sadat assassination). The second is precluded by Israelis' basic decency and their history as victims of the Holocaust.
Note that I exclude the very idea of a peacefully negotiated solution with the Palestinians: the Palestinians, HAMAS in particular, themselves exclude that, both to the extent that they declare their end as the elimination of Israel and to the extent that, given virtually every one of their demands at Taba, they walked away rather than accept peace on their own terms. Essentially, this situation will continue either until the Palestinians so escalate their use of force that only their destruction will secure Israel, or until the entire structure of Palestinian society changes.
To that latter end, Israel could actually contribute, but it would be both bloody and difficult to sustain, and would require essentially all Israeli political factions to commit to it to withstand the reaction of the international community. Israel would have to reoccupy the areas controlled by Palestinians now, and take over day to day civil administration. That is, they would not merely have to eliminate HAMAS and its immediate supporters in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, it would have to take over the schools and institute new curricula, take over the mosques and censor the imams, take over ever institution in the Palestinian areas and crush all resistance. In other words, Israel would have to abandon its central character. So that's not going to happen either.
Perhaps the only remaining solution is to totally isolate Gaza physically, with no aid shipments or movement of people in and out, no electricity coming in from Israel, and so on. Turn Gaza, in other words, into a large high-security prison.
Basically, what I'm getting at is that there are no good options to end this, and the reality is that the current situation — Israel under constant low level attack, and every once in a while attacking back in turn — is the stable state situation for the Israel/Palestinian situation. Until, that is, it is pushed out of its equilibrium by some outside event.
I do not understand the point about Hamas aspiring to be a state including all of Israel makes it less of a state in its more limited geography. Taiwan is a state.
I also have to point out, rather crassly, that those scary maps of Palestine fail to move me, since the same map is available in Israel with two small modifications: the area is shown as Israel, and it includes the Golan Heights. Palestinian autonomous Bantustans under Oslo showed up on road maps only after the violence made it important for Israelis and tourists to know where they should not, or could not, go.
I notice that in 2006 the Israeli government returned the Green Line to maps; it had been gone since the Begin government. Look for a speedy reversal if Likud win the upcoming election.
An aside to AJL re Golan: I am no master at tactics, but given the facts of geography and present threats, relinquishing any more of their (held) parts of the Golan Heights seems unwise; high ground is valuable ground. 1967 showed that.