The Stratagem Behind The Convention

Israel Harel

Haaretz

07 August 09

The Israeli right is once again up in arms, but then, it always rushes in first. Yet this time, the disappointment is also evident in the more pragmatic camp. (Kadima MK Avi Dichter, for instance, said the statements by Fatah leaders send the organization back 20 years.) After all the praise that successive Israeli leaders have heaped on Fatah's peace-loving leaders, they are repaying us with statements about continuing the armed struggle.

But if that is the direction Fatah's convention is taking, why is the government even allowing the thousands of Fatah members to come to Bethlehem? After all, the result will be a crude anti-Israel extravaganza. One can easily imagine, people are saying, how Likud would have reacted if a leftist government had allowed proven terrorists to convene a mere bowshot from Jerusalem and inflame themselves with rhetoric about resuming the armed struggle.

Is this yet another situation in which "only Likud can do it?" Since it was proved this week that we have a macho prime minister (who forced a majority of both his party and coalition to vote for the land privatization law and the so-called Mofaz law), one must conclude that Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately allowed the thousands of delegates to flock to the Fatah convention. But he was not trying to achieve a reputation for openness and meeting the enemy halfway: His main goal was to extract proof from the Palestinians - proof that would convince Israeli public opinion in particular - on whether we are really dealing with "moderates" here.

Therefore, he ordered that they be allowed to gather and bare their teeth: The dynamic of rhetoric and competition over leadership jobs would do the rest. Indeed, this goal was already achieved in the warm-up phase, before the convention even started - as the open concern expressed this week by members of Israel's moderate camp amply demonstrates. True, there was a nonnegligible risk that the Palestinians would not supply the goods. But now that they are supplying them, in spades, the achievement is complete.

This success was achieved mainly thanks to the Israeli peace camp's veteran dialogue partners. A week before the convention, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) - who is received with the honor reserved for heads of state not only at the King David Hotel, but also at the White House, the Elysee and Buckingham Palace - declared that the Palestinians reserve the right to engage in armed resistance. Were it not for the impressive skill at machinations that our government has demonstrated since it was established, it would have hastened to announce that if this is how the leader of the moderates talks, the convention will result in escalated violence, not progress toward peace, and therefore, Israel will refuse to allow the delegates to enter Bethlehem.

That would have been logical, no? But since Israel's real goal is the exact opposite - namely, to highlight that even the Palestinians' most moderate wing is characterized by inherent aggressiveness - Abu Mazen enabled that goal to be achieved even before the convention opened.

So did Jibril Rajoub, who allowed the highlights of his convention speech ("the military option has not been abandoned") to be published and thereby showed his claws. Now Israel can prove who this man, this fixture at peace conferences both in Israel and throughout the world, really is: He was and remains a terrorist.

But the Israeli media did not fall into this trap. As longstanding and loyal Fatah supporters, they understood that the Palestinians had played into the hands of the rightist government. So, as is their wont, the media demonstrated responsibility by trying, as they have so often in the past, to play down their darlings' warlike statements. Yet the harsh public reactions show that this time, unlike in the past, the media have not managed to tip the scales. The Fatah convention, at least from the standpoint of Israel's interests, is proving a success whose importance would be hard to overstate.
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