A Love Letter to Hamas - A Reality Check

Sharyn Mittelman..
jwire.com..
06 March '13..

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday dedicated their front pages to a profile of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal – interviewed in Qatar by Fairfax senior journalist Paul McGeough. There were also a number of subsequent articles on Meshal by McGeough over the weekend in those papers.

The main ‘scoop’ is that Meshal may seek the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. However, this is not news at all to anyone who has been following Palestinian politics – it has been discussed for more than a year. McGeough writes in “Hamas chief evokes Arab Spring to lead all Palestinians”:

“In the wake of the Arab Spring, Hamas is banking on a surge of regional support for Islamism to move, Mr Mishal to the top of the Palestinian pile, possibly as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation… At 78, Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority, the PLO and the secular Fatah, has said he wants to quit public life. At the same time, Mr Mishal says he wants to quit as the leader of Hamas, but has no intention of leaving public life.”

McGeough has long been fascinated with Hamas and Meshal in particular, writing a book in 2009 Kill Khalid: The failed Mossad assassination of Khalid Mishal and the rise of Hamas, and joining the 2010 flotilla that attempted to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.

McGeough’s articles over the weekend with photos to match, provided a glorified picture of Meshal – painting him as a resistance leader capable of moderating but also an ‘every man’ – a grandfather who plays with his grandchidren, a man who plays table-tennis and goes to the gym. McGeough does not detail Meshal’s reported funding and organising of terrorist attacks on innocent Israelis.

This continued a pattern first noted by counter-terrorism expert Mathew Levitt in his book review of ‘Kill Khalid’:

“The author’s firsthand access to Khalid Mishal in his Damascus head-quarters makes for strong narrative, to be sure. But in his captivation with the subject of his study, McGeough glosses over Meshal’s lesser virtues. According to declassified U.S. intel-ligence, made public when the U.S. Treasury designated Meshal as a ter-rorist, there are ‘cells in the military wing based in the West Bank that are under Mishaal’s [sic] control.’ More-over, the U.S. information revealed, ‘Mishaal [sic] has been responsible for supervising assassination operations, bombings and the killing of Israeli settlers’ and provides instructions to elements of the Hamas Qassam Brigades terrorist wing.”

Palestinian Leaders Use Their People as Cannon Fodder—Again

Evelyn Gordon
Commentary/Contentions
07 June '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/07/palestinian-leaders-use-their-people-as-cannon-fodder%E2%80%94again/

Palestinian society has produced no shortage of people willing to die for the cause of destroying Israel. So it’s encouraging to discover that not all Palestinians relish the role of cannon fodder. A day after as many as 23 were killed in Sunday’s attempt to storm Israel’s border (if you believe Syrian government figures), thousands of angry mourners turned on their own leaders in Syria’s Yarmouk refugee camp.

The mourners reportedly attacked the headquarters of the Palestinian terrorist group PFLP-GC, accusing its leaders of endangering their lives by sending them into the line of fire. When Hamas leader Khaled Meshal came to offer condolences, they reportedly assailed him too. The result was predictable: PFLP-GC security guards opened fire on their own people, killing 14 and wounding 43.

Yet shouldn’t Yarmouk residents have known that storming Israel’s border would be dangerous? Syria’s state-controlled media may be mum on the Assad government’s violence against its own people, but they avidly covered the death of four Palestinian-Syrians in the last such attempt, just three weeks ago. The obvious conclusion is that either the terrorists controlling Yarmouk maintain an even tighter information clampdown than Assad’s government, or they gave residents little choice about getting on those buses to the border. Either way, the PFLP-GC clearly rules Yarmouk with an iron first and has no qualms about sacrificing ordinary Palestinians’ lives to delegitimize Israel.

In this, unfortunately, the PFLP-GC isn’t unusual. Palestinians have always been ill-served by their leadership—and that includes the West’s current darlings, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. Granted, their government has significantly improved the West Bank economy and law enforcement. But it has yet to resettle a single Palestinian refugee, though almost 700,000 inhabit squalid West Bank refugee camps. Nor has it attempted to get putative allies like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to ease the often appalling conditions of Palestinian refugees there. And its recent reconciliation agreement with Hamas included no provision for resettling the 500,000 living in Hamas-run Gaza’s refugee camps. The Abbas-Fayyad government would rather condemn the refugees to ongoing misery than give up the fantasy of someday destroying the Jewish state by resettling all 4.8 million of them in Israel

For the same reason, they are now relentlessly pursuing unilateral statehood rather than accepting Israel’s repeated offers of statehood by agreement. A recent poll found that 70 percent of Palestinians expect a new intifada to erupt if negotiations reach an impasse, which they inevitably will as long as Abbas refuses even to meet with Israeli leaders while pursuing a unilateral strategy that won’t actually remove a single Israeli from the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians died in the first intifada and thousands in the second; a third would likely prove equally deadly. But such numbers evidently do not trouble Abbas and Fayyad as long as unilateral statehood effectively serves their campaign to delegitimize Israel.

The real question is when a critical mass of Palestinians will finally tire of serving as cannon fodder in the quest for Israel’s destruction. For only once this happens will peace become possible.

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More Details From Hamas About Their Two-Phase Solution

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
11 May '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/11/more-details-from-hamas-about-their-two-phase-solution/

Over the weekend, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal danced around the question over what the Islamist terrorist group meant by its newly declared acceptance of a two-state solution. As Rick wrote on Monday, he told the New York Times that this mean a Palestinian state in every inch of the territories that were occupied by Jordan and Egypt from 1949 to 1967 including Jerusalem with no swaps of territories with Israel. When asked whether this would mean an end to the conflict, he replied, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Yesterday, Mahmoud Zahar, another senior Hamas official, filled in a few more details about the Hamas “peace” plan. According to the Jerusalem Post, though the group now says it will accept the idea of two states, the Palestinians will not recognize Israel, because doing so would “cancel the right of the next generations to liberate the lands.” He also noted that recognition of Israel could lead to Palestinian refugees losing their right of return.

He also clarified that Hamas’s unity pact with Fatah does not mean an end to “resistance” against Israel though the Islamists are interested in maintaining the current cease-fire along the border with Gaza (that is only intermittently broken by terrorist missiles aimed at Israeli civilians), they want it understood that “a truce is not peace.”

Interestingly, Zahar also warned that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas would not be allowed to visit Hamas-ruled Gaza anytime soon.

There are those who are interpreting these comments as progress towards peace because this is the first time that Hamas has not insisted that there will only be an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. That may be so. But it is also being made clear that Hamas views the current cease fire or even the proclamation of a Palestinian state which they will rule in coalition with Fatah as just an interim move that would merely be a prelude to future aggression against Israel. There is no logical reason why Israel should agree to making more tangible concessions to the Palestinians as a result of these statements since the only result will be a continuation of the conflict on more unfavorable terms in the future. If even the cease-fire with the Palestinians is not to be permanent, what possible reason would there be for Israel to accept such terms, as many in the United States and Europe are urging, as a basis for negotiations?

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Hamas tells the truth, but the Times misleads

Fresnozionism.org
06 May '11



Ethan Bronner of the NY Times created a sensation yesterday (or the Times’ headline writer did) when his piece titled “Hamas Leader Calls for Two-State Solution, but Refuses to Renounce Violence” appeared.

Hamas calls for a two-state solution? Do you mean that Hamas has recanted its charter and now believes that Jews can be allowed a sovereign state of any size somewhere between the Jordan and the Mediterranean?

Hardly.

Bronner writes,

“The whole world knows what Hamas thinks and what our principles are,” [Hamas political leader Khaled] Meshal said in an interview in his Cairo hotel suite. “But we are talking now about a common national agenda. The world should deal with what we are working toward now, the national political program.”


He defined that as “a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as its capital, without any settlements or settlers, not an inch of land swaps and respecting the right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel itself.

In other words, today we want a Judenrein Palestinian state in the territories, plus an Arab majority in Israel. Tomorrow?

Asked if a deal honoring those principles would produce an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Meshal said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

In other words, no.

He added: “When Israel made agreements with Egypt and Jordan, no one conditioned it on how Israel should think. The Arabs and the West didn’t ask Israel what it was thinking deep inside. All Palestinians know that 60 years ago they were living on historic Palestine from the river to the sea. It is no secret.”


Asked whether in his pact with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, he agreed to end violent resistance, he replied: “Where there is occupation and settlement, there is a right to resistance. Israel is the aggressor. But resistance is a means, not an end.”

In other words, all of the land belongs to them, and if it is ‘occupied’, they have the right to make war — even if we concede all of their demands!

According to this version of the ‘two-state solution’, Israel agrees to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the territories and promises to take no action against Hamas. Hamas explicitly does not agree that a sovereign Jewish entity has a right to exist, but will stop active aggression until it feels strong enough to defeat Israel. Meanwhile, Israel agrees to allow millions of hostile Arabs to enter its country, end the Jewish majority and — undoubtedly — precipitate a civil war. What a deal!

Bronner continues,

He noted that Hamas had entered into cease-fires with Israel in the past and that it was ready to do so in the future. There is one in effect right now. But his broad principle, he said, was this: “If occupation [from the river to the sea -- ed.] ends, resistance ends. If Israel stops firing, we stop firing.”

Hamas has offered cease-fires before, on the model of Mohammad’s famous hudna with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. The treaty called for a period of ten years of peace, like the cease-fire proposal made by Hamas official Ahmed Youssef in 2006. In the case of Hudaybiyyah, Mohammad found a pretext a year later, conquered Mecca and slaughtered the Qurayash.

I should add that previous short-term hudnas have foundered when Hamas, exercising its peaceful rights to dig tunnels under the border or plant explosives near the fence in order to execute operations to kidnap Israelis, has run into IDF opposition.

The concept of a ‘two-state solution’ has always been ambiguous. Even the supposedly ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas has never agreed to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, nor give up the claim to ‘right of return’. For the Arabs, the ‘two states’ have always been ‘Palestine’, where Jews can’t live, and a new Arab majority state where some Jews may live — for a while. This is quite different from the idea of ‘two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace’. The addition of Hamas to the Palestinian Authority makes the contrast even more stark.

Regarding Bronner and the Times: it’s hard to think of a more misleading title for this article.

Link: http://fresnozionism.org/2011/05/hamas-tells-the-truth-but-the-times-misleads/

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