To what extent was Abbas complicit in the aggression of Hamas?

...As for Israeli politicians who propose to renew peace negotiations, with Abbas or whomever, they are advised to make two basic stipulations. First, that Israel will negotiate only with a Palestinian government that officially recognizes its obligation to demilitarize Gaza. Second, that no agreements can be signed until the Palestinians hold the projected elections for their parliament and presidency -- and the outcome is known. All the above might also deflate the Palestinian public's delusions of victory. Palestinians will sober up only when they grasp that they reduced Gaza to ruins in vain and that without disarmament they will just have to live in those ruins. To allow them reconstruction before that will merely encourage fresh outbreaks of militant folly.

Best Frenemies? Mahmoud Abbas (r) meets with
the Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal
in Qatar, July 20, 2014.

Malcolm Lowe..
Gatestone Institute..
11 September '14..

The recent hostilities between Hamas and Israel have prompted various Israeli figures, in the governing coalition as well as in the opposition, to advocate an enhanced role for Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority [PA], in an eventual solution for Gaza. The implausibility of this idea has been pointed out elsewhere. What both the proponents and the critics of this idea have not asked, however, is a more fundamental question: To what extent was Abbas complicit in the aggression of Hamas?

For sure, Abbas did once criticize Hamas when the organization began to fire rockets at Israel early in July 2014. Hamas officials thereupon branded him "a criminal" and "a Likud member." From then on, Abbas denounced only Israel. Moreover, the envoys of his PA sought to mobilize international pressure to stop Israel from mounting a ground operation to destroy the tunnels that Hamas had built into Israeli territory. In the intermittent negotiations moderated by Egypt to establish a lasting ceasefire, the delegation from Abbas's Fatah faction endorsed all the preposterous demands made by Hamas upon Israel as a condition for ending hostilities.

Worse than that, Palestinian Media Watch has documented a stream of statements by Fatah officials that expressed identification with Hamas aggression. Criticism of Hamas did not emerge again until Hamas began to execute alleged collaborators without trial. Only then did Abbas aide Tayeb Abdel Rahim denounce Hamas for perpetrating "cold-blooded murders." With good reason: Hamas had confined known Fatah activists under house arrest and these would be obvious targets for summary execution.

When Abbas met Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas supremo, in Qatar during August 21-22, international speculation was that he would plead with Mashaal for a fresh ceasefire. Quite wrong. The meeting ended with a joint call to the United Nations for "a resolution that would define a timetable for the end of Israel's occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state." More significantly, the two leaders emphasized that the Palestinian unity government formed by Fatah and Hamas in June "represents all the Palestinian people and looks after their interests."

That is, this became a meeting of the founders of the unity government, in order to review developments and make further joint plans. It confirms that the decision of Abbas to form the unity government was the starting point for all subsequent developments. In order to evaluate Abbas's motives for taking that decision, let us recall three well-established facts about him.

First of all, he is Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, having in 1982 earned a doctorate in Moscow with a PhD dissertation denying the Holocaust, which was published as a book in 1984. Here he claimed that the Holocaust was a product of Nazi-Zionist collaboration aimed at driving Jews out of Europe into Mandatory Palestine. He also suggested that the number of Jewish victims may have been under a million, but that the Zionists inflated the figures in order to gain support for Israel. More recently he has made statements deploring the Holocaust as an "unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation," yet without repudiating his doctoral thesis.

Second, Abbas regarded Yasser Arafat's decision to launch the Second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 as a ghastly mistake that inflicting great suffering on the Palestinian population without making significant political gains. But thirdly, Abbas and the Fatah movement in general have never differed from either Arafat or Hamas about the ultimate aim of Palestinian nationalism: the disappearance of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state in the whole area of Mandatory Palestine.

The Package Deal of Palestinian Corruption and Terror

...If the Palestinians are to go on shaking down Western governments for contributions to pay their people for no-work or no-show jobs, they at least need to put a halt to terrorism. Sympathy for Palestinian workers is easy. But so long as the Israeli teenagers remain missing—and with each passing day hope for their safe recovery may be dimming—the West needs to refuse to go on doing business as usual with the corrupt Palestinian bureaucracy that turns a blind eye to, and subsidizes, terror.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
26 June '14..

As the second week of the search for the three Israeli teenagers abducted by Hamas terrorists comes to an end, the announcement of the names of two prime suspects in the kidnapping is all that passes for progress in the search. But while these Hamas operatives are still on the loose, the international community is grappling with what it seems to consider a more important problem: how to pay 42,000 Hamas employees in Gaza.

The 42,000 Hamas workers seem to be the big losers in the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement that put an end to Secretary of State John Kerry’s Middle East peace initiative. The unity deal was motivated in large measure by the fact that the Islamist group has run out of money due to its break with its former Iranian sponsors and the shutting down of smuggling tunnels to Egypt by the military government in Cairo. They hoped the shortfall would be resolved by going into business with their Fatah rivals in control of the Palestinian Authority. The PA, which is subsidized via aid from the European Union and the United States, was supposed to pay the salaries of the 42,000 Hamas government employees. But since the Fatah-run kleptocracy has also been paying the salaries of the workers that it employed in Gaza since the Hamas coup in 2007, it has now said that it can’t afford to pay both them and the Hamas staff.

This both exposes the corruption at the heart of Palestinian governance and also raises some serious questions about how and why the U.S. can go on in its relationship with the PA.

The fact is Fatah governs the West Bank largely by the traditional Tammany Hall tactic of spreading around the wealth. The roster of Palestinians with government jobs of the no-work and the no-show variety is so vast that estimates vary. But no matter what the actual number is, the point is that Fatah uses foreign aid money to support large numbers of West Bank Palestinians in this manner. Hamas played the same game in Gaza before the cash ran out. Neither group cares much about actually using their funds to provide even basic services for Palestinians. The point of jobs that are in the gift of either Fatah or Hamas is to secure political loyalty and all that it entails when you are dealing with organizations that have both “political” and “military” wings.

That fact doesn’t come across in the latest sympathetic piece about life in Gaza from the New York Times. In it, the paper profiles two Gazans. One, a Fatah supporter, has been living the Palestinian version of La Dolce Vita since 2007 as he collected his full salary without ever doing a day’s work in the last seven years. The other, the Hamas supporter, made peanuts and was actually forced to perform some duties while his friends were in power. But now that they’ve run out of money, he’s been plunged back into poverty. The upshot of all this is that the international community needs to step up and give him his old salary back even though the tiny, though overpopulated Gaza Strip does not need two bloated sets of civil servants.

An Intifada with a Twist?

...If Hamas can cause the downfall of Abbas in the West Bank before elections can be held, they can avoid the trouble of pretending to be on the outside for those elections and can simply rule directly. The Obama administration officials who thought this was a good idea were pretty clearly outsmarted–but they probably thought they had more time before that became clear. Hamas seems to have other ideas.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
23 June '14..

During the earlier, more hopeful days of the Arab Spring it was common for people to wonder aloud if the revolutionary momentum would reach the Palestinians. One major difference between the Palestinians and Egyptians or Syrians was that the Palestinians have a degree of self-rule. Any uprising in the Palestinian territories might therefore target the Palestinian Authority or Hamas before Israel, and would likely result in less, not more Palestinian freedom because of it: Hamas would crackdown brutally in Gaza, and if the PA fell in the West Bank it would be replaced by a more authoritarian ruler (probably Hamas).

In part that was the folly of having elections in the territories that included Hamas back in 2006: if you gave the Palestinians a chance to punish the ruling party when Hamas was the only alternative, you would get Hamas in government. In the end, that’s exactly what happened. And it’s why many were warning against the United States giving its blessing to a Hamas-Fatah unity government that would soon call for elections. Mahmoud Abbas has been in office twice as long as his legal term; given the corruption of Fatah and the pent-up desire to register their discontent, the Palestinians could be expected to once again empower Hamas.

But now we’re seeing the possibility of Hamas gaining the upper hand without having to wait for an election. Both Haaretz and Khaled Abu Toameh are reporting the rumblings of a new intifada in the West Bank–only this time aimed at Abbas. As Jonathan mentioned earlier, the unrest is tied to Abbas’s criticism of the kidnapping of Israeli teenagers and the Israeli army’s West Bank operation to track them down. Here’s Toameh:

The attack on the Palestinian police station came amid growing Palestinian discontent with PA President Mahmoud Abbas over his opposition to the kidnapping of the three Israeli youths.

Palestinians representing various Palestinian factions, including Abbas’s own Fatah, have resorted to social media to denounce Abbas and his security forces as “traitors” for helping Israel in its efforts to locate the three youths.

One campaign on Facebook entitled, “I’m Palestinian and Abbas doesn’t represent me” has drawn hundreds of supporters.

Palestinian protests against Abbas and security coordination with Israel have recently become a daily occurrence in the West Bank, where Palestinian protesters are no longer afraid to express their views in public.

The Palestinian Authority has begun to feel the heat and that is why its security forces have been instructed to use an iron-fist policy not only against its critics, but also against Palestinian and Western journalists in the West Bank.

On June 20, Palestinian policemen broke up a protest in Hebron by families of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and beat a number of journalists, including a CNN reporter who had his camera smashed.

But the Haaretz piece gets right to the point. Its subheadline, echoed in the article as well, is: “The Palestinian president will soon have to decide whether he’s in favor of Israel or his own people.”

Abbas and the Godfather’s Goodfellas by Sarah Honig

...It’s altogether too inconvenient and politically incorrect to take to task goodfellas who claim divine rights to annihilate an entire nation. Too distasteful. Better ignore it. It’s just a load of more Jewish whining. This is likely why the kidnapped Israeli boys scarcely aroused empathy abroad.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
20 June '14..

Don Mahmoud Abbas’s feelings have been deeply hurt. Three Israeli boys fell prey to Hamas abductors who set out from his turf and retreated back to it. But how dare insensitive Israelis insinuate that the Godfather is tainted by his pact with the most infamous ringleaders of Hamastan’s Murder Incorporated and its offshoots?

Cut to the quick, Abbas swears he’s merely in league with “professional experts.” Sure he does. No mafia godfather is likely to spill the beans on his “understandings” with affiliate mob families. Hence Abbas’s pseudo-condemnation of the boys’ abduction, his make-believe ignorance about who did the troublesome deed and his real opposition to whatever might damage his PR.

Gangland’s guise must be spruced up. Anything else nullifies the affectation’s raison d’être.

The whole idea is to camouflage the nefarious with a veneer of respectability, to pull the wool over genuinely gullible eyes or to facilitate further feigned faith in the fraud for the hardly-gullible. This is Don Abbas’s serial modus operandi. It’s essential that his renewed collaboration with Gaza’s goon bosses strike the right chord and lend the impression that their reenergized syndicate runs legitimate, reputable enterprises.

Abbas’s fraud (or pretend fraud) is essential to equip American president Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry with the excuse to “work” with the new Palestinian “unity” setup. To expect Don Abbas to unmask his “coalition of technocrats” as including Hamas lackeys is beyond the irrational.

Why would Ramallah’s godfather sabotage the deception he has labored so hard to cook up? Why would he knowingly undermine his own ruse?

Of course he’d try to pass off his latest joint venture with Hamas as on the up-and-up and indeed benevolent. Of course he’d insist that Gaza’s goodfellas have subscribed to all the basic rules of acceptable behavior.

Why not? How else can he perpetrate his sham? Besides, these are mere words and they can be retracted in no time anytime – not to mention that trifling detail that these reassurances are mouthed by Abbas and never-ever uttered by any Hamas honcho.

Nothing brings this better to light than Ihab al-Ghussein’s Facebook admission of June 8 (divulged by the Palestinian Media Watch). Al-Ghussein was Hamas spokesman right up until the recent amalgamation, so he should know whereof he speaks. It’s his learned observation that Abbas is out to intentionally scam the Americans when he misrepresents the Fatah-Hamas alliance:

“You know what Abbas says behind closed doors? He says: ‘Guys, let me say what I say to the media. Those words are meant for the Americans and the occupation [Israel]… What’s important is that we agree among ourselves. In other words, when I go out and say that the [unity] government is my government and that it recognizes Israel and so on… these words are meant to trick the Americans.’”

Al Ghussein elaborates: “The same thing happened in 2006. He [Abbas] said: ‘Don’t harp on everything I tell the media…’ The problem really isn’t with him [Abbas] but with whoever believes him. Ha, ha, ha!”

The laugh would have been on Obama and crew had they been genuine dupes. But are they?

Surprised Mahmoud Abbas Fails the Litmus Test?

...And any reporter or for that matter politician or "peace activist" who meets with Mahmoud Abbas and declines to ask him the real question is only engaging in self-deception.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
19 June '14..





Has Mahmoud Abbas turned the corner?

There is a simple litmus test.

If and when Israel gets its hands on the terrorists who kidnapped our three boys.

And the terrorists are still alive.

What does Mahmoud Abbas say Israel should do?

Does he say: Let those bastards rot in prison?

Or does he say: Israel must free all Palestinians it holds in prison without exception.

That's the real question.

That’s the real test.

Who exactly does the U.S. support or is supporting?

...Even though Hamas has refused to renounce terrorism, PA President Mahmoud Abbas says that the policies of the new government will be his policies, which supposedly oppose violence. The US pretends to believe him, and apparently pretends to believe that he can or wants to control Hamas terrorism against Israel.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
12 June '14..

The US has given the Palestinian Authority (PA) about $5 billion since the mid 1990s. From 2008 to the present, US aid has averaged about $500 million a year. Some of this money goes directly to training and equipping PA ‘security’ forces, and the biggest part of the PA’s own budget goes to ‘security’. On numerous occasions, members of these forces have been involved in terrorism against Israel.

For years, the PA has been paying salaries to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons and pensions to the families of suicide bombers, regardless of the faction they belong to. This created a stir in the US Congress and European countries, so the PLO is taking over the payments from the PA. Since the PLO receives its funding from international support of the PA, this has no practical significance.

The PA Unity Government, sworn in last week, is a partnership between Hamas and the PLO. Supposedly, none of the official cabinet members are members of Hamas (the word they use is ‘technocrats’). The US pretends to believe that all decisions taken by the PA are therefore independent of Hamas.

Even though Hamas has refused to renounce terrorism, PA President Mahmoud Abbas says that the policies of the new government will be his policies, which supposedly oppose violence. The US pretends to believe him, and apparently pretends to believe that he can or wants to control Hamas terrorism against Israel.

Hamas is at war with Israel, a US ally. So far in 2014, more than 140 rockets have been fired into Israel from Hamas’ Gaza territory (about 12,800 since 2001). Since the formation of the unity government last week, there have been several rocket attacks, including one yesterday.

Although the Oslo Accords that created the PA allow it to have only police-type security forces and light weapons, Hamas has a 20,000-man army (as of 2008, more today) and missiles that can explode in Tel Aviv. Hamas officials have said that they intend to keep their military forces despite joining the PA.

And yet, the US intends to continue supporting the PA. A cynical person might think the US is paying the Palestinians to fight Israel.

Still Prisoners and Hostages of the Oslo Accords?

...There’s always the chance that a confluence of ideas like what took place at Herzliya will change the calculus–that if left, right, and center all push for a grand rethinking of the peace process it might happen. But that’s not been the case in recent years. And the dedication to the status quo, which ignores changes on the ground and keeps policymakers of the future glued to discredited ideas of the past, negates critical thinking and discourages creative solutions. If that doesn’t change, Oslo will continue to be associated with preventing peace, not presaging it.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
11 June '14..

One of the striking aspects of the last two decades of Shimon Peres’s long career in Israeli public life is how much of a prisoner he was to his own near-success. Peres was a driving force behind the Oslo peace process and the crucial negotiations that led to the Declaration of Principles before the agreement melted under the hot lights of reality. Yet in many ways the deal trapped him, having to carry its banner and defend the possibility of its fulfillment for the rest of his time in office.

Peres was on the Israeli left, sure, but his career had been marked–as so many of his contemporaries in both generations–by partisan fluidity. The AFP analysis Jonathan mentioned yesterday illustrates this: it says Peres was once considered a hawk because, in part, he ordered the shelling of Lebanese territory in 1996. Yet that was after Oslo. By such an accounting, Peres was a pragmatist. But with Oslo only mostly dead, he was never really able, aside from a token move to leave Labor for Kadima under Ariel Sharon, to get out of its shadow.

This is hardly surprising considering the fact that Oslo has trapped, to a large extent, Peres’s country on the whole, including Israeli politicians who don’t support or defend it. Consider the Herzliya conference in Israel this week. While former ambassador Michael Oren’s “Plan B” idea for a new direction in the peace process–something akin to a coordinated unilateralism–has been discussed for months, BuzzFeed reports that Herzliya has seen something of a parade of alternative peace plans.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid, former settlers’ advocate Dani Dayan, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett have all offered their ideas. Here’s the crux of Dayan’s:

He wants to ignore the peace process entirely and to loosen restrictions on Palestinians and improve their daily lives without waiting for a negotiated solution. Dayan, an advocate of one shared state for Palestinians and Israelis, is pressing the Israeli government to remove the separation barrier — a looming symbol of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank — that separates Israeli and Palestinian communities. Israelis and Palestinians should be allowed to live wherever they want, he argues, and travel into one another’s territories. …

Many of Israel’s right-wing leadership, including Danny Danon, the deputy defense minister, have also thrown their weight behind the plan.

“In general I think that we should try to find ways to make the lives of the Palestinians easier,” Danon said. “That’s something I support.”

The plan has also been well-received by former Israeli defense officials. Moshe Arens, a former defense minister, has publicly backed the plan.

American Weakness and the Fatah-Hamas Government

...The fundamental problem remains: There is no credible Palestinian political force committed to an enduring peace deal with Israel. Therefore, expect more violence, both among the Palestinians and against Israel, and expect, as a consequence, further international vilification of Israel for taking the necessary measures to protect its population. Like I said, from now on, it's all about damage limitation.

Ben Cohen..
Pundicity/JNS/The Algemeiner
10 June '14..

I've long argued that any proper understanding of the Palestinian conflict with Israel's legitimacy is compromised by not taking wider regional factors into account. The shorthand that describes this specific regional clash as "The Middle East Conflict" is dangerously misguided, because it ignores other factors that are far more important, such as the historically violent schism between Sunni and Shi'a Islam, Iran's renewed assertiveness in Syria and Lebanon, the shared strategic interests binding Israel and the conservative regimes in the Arab Gulf in confronting Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the fragmentation of the various jihadi groups in Sinai, Syria, Iraq, and other territories.

That's why I want to preface my comments about the new Palestinian unity government, which brings together Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement with the Islamists of Hamas, by pointing to a political rally several hundred miles to the east of Jerusalem, in Tehran.

At that rally, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stood in front of a banner that declared, "America cannot do a damned thing." A "military attack is not a priority for Americans now," Khamenei boasted. "They have renounced the idea of any military actions," he said.

In other words, in the Middle East as a whole, America is weak, or is at least perceived to be weak. And weakness has a natural partner in the form of naïveté—the exact word used by Israeli government minister Gilad Erdan to describe the Obama administration's acceptance of the new Fatah-Hamas coalition, but which could equally apply to the American approach to conflicts from Libya in the west to Afghanistan in the east.

After all, would Abbas have cut a deal with Hamas if he were dealing with an American administration with a tough and cogent Middle Eastern policy? Would Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, have been hoodwinked into believing that because the new PA government's ministries are largely run by technocrats, the American pledge to shun Hamas while it remains a terrorist organization has not been violated? I think not.

Still, Israel's supporters are compelled to deal with this situation as it is, and not as we would like it to be. Hence, we have a choice. We can lambast Secretary of State John Kerry for placing the lion's share of the blame for the recent collapse of peace talks on Israel, while ignoring Abbas's pursuit of unilateral recognition for a Palestinian state, and his reconciliation with the genocidal anti-Semites of Hamas. We can laugh, bitterly, at Obama's statement to Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg that Abbas is "sincere" about resolving "these issues in a diplomatic fashion that meets the concerns of the people of Israel"—a line worthy of a Monty Python scriptwriter.

But as therapeutic as doing all that might be, it is not a replacement for a political strategy. With more than two years to go before President Obama departs the White House, the best strategy we can work for now is damage limitation.

The art of making murder respectable

As George Orwell noted in his classic 1946 work Politics and the English Language, "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
10 June '14..

Barely a week has passed since the Palestinian unity government was sworn in, and the international community has wasted little time in conferring legitimacy on this nascent terrorist regime.

Tossing aside any pretense of morality, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations all embraced the new Palestinian administration, despite its incorporation of Hamas, a genocidal Islamic terror organization.

In case anyone forgot, Hamas is the Palestinian equivalent of Murder, Inc. Its main claim to fame is popularizing suicide bombings and rocket attacks against innocent civilians, blowing up passenger buses during rush hour and demonizing Jews as the "sons of monkeys and pigs."

Adding irony to insult, the West agreed to work with these terrorists-in-suits during the week commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when Washington and its allies unequivocally mustered the determination to combat evil.

Nowadays, rather than standing up to the forces of darkness, America and the West prefer to kowtow. This is nothing less morally obscene. It shows a complete abdication of decency and leadership. President Barack Obama and other Western decision- makers should be ashamed of themselves.

Indeed, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Hamas' first attacks, when the organization burst onto the scene in a brutally bloody manner. On February 16, 1989, two Hamas terrorists disguised as haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews kidnapped Sgt. Avi Sasportas, an army medic, at Hodaya Junction and murdered him. A few months later, on May 3, 1989, Cpl. Ilan Saadon was abducted and killed in a similar manner. Seven long years would pass before their bodies were discovered and their families could finally bury their loved ones.

Hamas continues to take pride in such actions.

What's the Probability of the West Funding Hamas?

....It remains to be seen whether American and European taxpayers will agree to pay salaries to thousands of Hamas civil servants and militiamen in the Gaza Strip, who have not renounced their intent to commit acts of terrorism or destroy Israel.

Hamas "civil servants" in the streets of Gaza.
(Image source: YouTube video)

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
09 June '14..

Less than a week after its inauguration, the Hamas-Fatah unity government is already facing its first crisis as it remains unclear which party will pay salaries to tens of thousands of Hamas employees in the Gaza Strip.

It turns out that Hamas was hoping that the reconciliation deal it signed with Fatah in April, which led to the formation of the unity government, would absolve the Islamist movement of its financial obligations toward its employees.

That plan was, in fact, the main reason Hamas agreed to the reconciliation accord with Fatah. Over the past few years, Hamas has been facing a severe financial crisis, particularly in the wake of Egypt's decision to destroy smuggling tunnels along its border with the Gaza Strip.

Hamas says that the new unity government is responsible for paying the salaries of its employees, but Fatah and Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas insist that this is not their responsibility.

The dispute between the two parties erupted into violence last week when hundreds of angry Hamas employees attacked a number of banks in the Gaza Strip after discovering that the unity government had failed to pay their salaries.

The Hamas employees also attacked PA civil servants who arrived to collect their salaries, which were transferred to their bank accounts by the unity government .

In response, thousands of PA civil servants, who were unable to withdraw their salaries, staged a protest in the Gaza Strip at which they accused Hamas "militias" of closing the banks and preventing them from receiving their money.

Mistaken and Misleading Middle East Symbolism

...Any prayer service of act of advocacy on behalf of Middle East peace that ignores this key question is part of the problem, not the solution. While we respect Pope Francis, like his misguided recent trip to the Middle East that bogged him down in dangerous acts of moral equivalency between terrorists and the victims of terror at Israel’s security barrier, this event was a mistake.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
08 June '12..

On Sunday, Pope Francis made good on his pledge to convene a summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders for a prayer service in Rome. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was there along with Israel’s President Shimon Peres. Along with Francis, both made speeches calling for peace and listened as clergy from the three major faiths spoke of symbolic acts of reconciliation that were, as a number of commentators noted, supposed to show that at the very least, religion can be a uniting factor rather than the engine that drives separation and hostility. Even though no one is pretending that a few speeches or prayers in Rome will change the facts of a stalemate between the two sides in the peace talks, the gesture will reinforce the pope’s reputation as a man intent on healing the world.

Given the pope’s evident good will, it’s hard to argue with the idea that his summit will do no harm and might cause the two sides to think about working harder for peace. But this piece of conventional wisdom is misleading. Though no one should question the pope’s intentions, the event at the Vatican is more than empty symbolism. This piece of grandstanding on the part of the church will not only did nothing to advance the cause of peace that was torpedoed by the Palestinian unity pact that brought the terrorists of Hamas into the PA along with Abbas’ Fatah. By lending the moral authority of a man who is rightly respected around the world for his probity and earnest desire to help others to a stunt that treats the partner of Islamist terrorists as a peacemaker, the event undermines any effort to pressure the PA to make a clear choice between peace with Israel or one with Hamas.

In fairness to the pope, his foolish even-handed approach differs little from that of the Obama administration which has decided to continue to send aid to the PA despite the involvement of the Hamas terrorists in its administration following the signing of the unity pact. Together with the European Union, the United States has effectively given its stamp of approval to a PA government that is making peace impossible. Palestinian unity has not brought Hamas into a government bent on creating an agreement based on coexistence and an end to violence. Rather, it signifies the joint position of the two main Palestinian factions that proclaims their refusal to ever recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn.

Seen in that context, the ceremonial symbolism in Rome is not just a distraction from the reality of a PA that refused Israeli offers of independence and peace three times between 2000 and 2008 and also refused to negotiate seriously in the last year of American-sponsored talks that amounts to a fourth such refusal. So long as the world refuses to place the same kind of brutal pressure on the Palestinians to give up their war on Zionism and accept a two-state solution that it puts on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, peace will remain impossible for the foreseeable future.

Well past a reasonable time to have declared ‘game over’

...There is no PA (and there is even less a ‘State of Palestine’). There are only terrorist organizations: Hamas and the various PLO factions. Perhaps Israel can talk to them or perhaps not, but whatever is done should be done honestly.

The PLO ‘recognized’ Israel the way we might
recognize a bear walking down the middle of
the street: you can’t ignore it, but you don’t
admit that it has a right to be where it is

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
06 June '14..

The establishment of a Palestinian Authority (PA) unity government that includes Hamas is the last inning of a ballgame which has been in extra innings far too long.

The PLO and its Fatah faction which have controlled the PA since its inception in 1993 are just as committed to Israel’s destruction as Hamas. Fatah is the heir of Haj Amin al-Husseini, pogromist and close ally of Hitler, by way of the terrorist’s terrorist, Yasser Arafat. They follow different strategies, but for Israel the goal is the same.

The US and EU (and today’s Israel!) draw a distinction between Hamas and the PLO, as if to say “see, we really do believe that there is such a thing as terrorism. Take Hamas, for example.” This is the same kind of maneuver the US executes by denouncing al-Qaeda while supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The ‘secret’ of the US and EU is that they really don’t much care who rules the Palestinian Arabs, as long as they get the Jews out of the territories. Even if al-Qaeda or Arafat’s ghost took over the PA, they would continue to fund it. Now they have quickly found a way to ignore the presence of Hamas.

But from Israel’s point of view, this may be the moment that it is possible to escape from the bind it got into in 1993 when it allowed itself to be suckered into a self-delusional agreement with Arafat that included accepting the pretense that the PLO ‘recognized’ the legitimacy of the Jewish state. In fact, the PLO ‘recognized’ Israel the way we might recognize a bear walking down the middle of the street: you can’t ignore it, but you don’t admit that it has a right to be where it is!

A reasonable time to have declared ‘game over’ was in 2000, when Arafat started a war in which most of the over 1000 Israeli casualties were noncombatants. Apparently Israel was unable to stand against American and European pressure then, so the charade of a ‘peace process’ was continued for another 14 years.

Taking account of where Israel is left as the US winks at the terrorists

"By this time next year, Hamas could have not only an intact military force and terrorist agenda in Gaza, but also a solid foothold in the West Bank and at least a say in — if not veto power over — PA and PLO decisions. In that case, a new system would take shape in the Palestinian territories in which an armed-to-the-teeth political party gradually overshadows the central government and begins to take over numerous institutions."

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
05 June '14..

A Wall Street Journal editorial published yesterday points out from line one the difference between ordinary political decisions of the sort one can agree or disagree with, and acts that will lead to people being killed, with the guns, bullets and salaries of the religiously-inspired killers being provided by unsuspecting citizens of certain great democracies.

U.S. Funding for Hamas? The State Department winks at the Palestinian merger with the terror group.
June 4, 2014 4:17 p.m. ET [Wall Street Journal]

The 1988 Hamas Charter explicitly commits the Palestinian terror group to murdering Jews. Thanks to the formation this week of an interim government uniting Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which the U.S. supports to the tune of more than $400 million a year, the American taxpayer may soon become an indirect party to that enterprise.

"Today we declare the end of the split and regaining the unity of the homeland," PA President Mahmoud Abbas said in televised remarks Monday. The split he was referring to is the bloody conflict between Mr. Abbas's Fatah faction, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which in 2007 forcibly expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

Previous attempts at reconciliation had failed in large part because Hamas had refused to subsume its armed wing to the PA. This time Mr. Abbas acquiesced to a partnership with a heavily armed terrorist group. The resulting relationship will likely resemble the one next door between the Lebanese government, with its negligible regular army, and the Shiite terror group Hezbollah, which like Hamas boasts an arsenal of Iranian-supplied missiles.

The question is whether the U.S. government will continue to fund the PA now that Mr. Abbas has cast his lot with a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization. U.S. law prohibits dispensing taxpayer money to any Palestinian entity over which Hamas exercises "undue influence."

To hew as close as possible to the letter of U.S. law, the architects of the Hamas-backed interim government have assembled a cabinet of old PA holdovers and technocrats from Gaza with no obvious links to Hamas. The maneuver was good enough for the Obama State Department. "At this point, it appears that President Abbas has formed an interim technocratic government that does not include ministers affiliated with Hamas," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters earlier this week. "Moving forward, we will be judging this government by its actions."

But that still leaves open the question of the PA's treaty obligations. The Oslo Accords and its progeny, including the 1998 Wye Memorandum, set very clear limits on the extent and potency of the PA arsenal. Under the Wye Memorandum, for example, the PA is required to "establish and vigorously and continuously implement a systematic program for the collection and appropriate handling of" illegal weapons.

Nobody should count on the aging and calculating Mr. Abbas to exercise meaningful control over Hamas's arsenal, much less its behavior. And nobody should count on the Obama Administration to apply meaningful penalties to the PA for joining forces with Hamas and flouting its obligations toward Israel. That leaves Congress, which can block funding to the Palestinians until they prove capable of governing themselves as something other than a terrorist enterprise.

Eminent Israeli strategic adviser and commentator, Ehud Yaari, writing in Times of Israel yesterday as well, says there are straightforward reasons why Hamas decided to get into a relationship with the Palestinian Authority, stemming from an internal review

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Washington accepts terror state - only requires English press releases

...#3. In the event of a rocket attack from Gaza, the only thing the United States expects PA President Mahmoud Abbas to do is issue a press release.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
03 June '14..




Let's read this incredibly shocking passage together:

"Well, we condemn all rocket attacks from Gaza. We would also expect President Abbas to do so as he has in the past, and we expect the Palestinian Authority to do everything in its power to prevent attacks from Gaza into Israel. But we recognize that Hamas currently controls Gaza..."
Jen Psaki - U.S. Department of State Spokesperson
Daily Press Briefing
Washington, DC
June 2, 2014

Now let me walk through what this means:

#1. The United States has absolutely no expectation that the formation of the unity PA government will have any significance with regard to the anything relating to security matters in the Gaza Strip.

#2. The United States accepts the continued control of Gaza by Hamas with Hamas in no way being expected to honor any of the written commitments that the PA is committed to – first and foremost that the Gaza Strip is a demilitarized zone.

#3. In the event of a rocket attack from Gaza, the only thing the United States expects PA President Mahmoud Abbas to do is issue a press release.

Now what?

I am optimistic.

If the American double-cross was more diplomatic, more muted, the temptation would have been to kick the can down the road and wait to see what develops.

Betraying Peace, Embracing of Hamas, All In A Day's Work

...By allowing American taxpayer dollars to flow to a government controlled in part by Hamas, Obama is violating U.S. law. But he’s also signaling that the U.S. has no intention of ever pressuring the Palestinians to take the two-state solution they’ve been repeatedly offered by Israel and always rejected. For a president that is obsessed with his legacy, that’s a mistake for which history ought never to forgive him.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
02 June '14.

When Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas chose to scuttle peace talks with Israel this spring by deciding to conclude a pact with Hamas rather than the Jewish state, he was taking a calculated risk. In embracing his Islamist rivals, Abbas sought to unify the two leading Palestinian factions not to make peace more possible but to make it impossible. Since Palestinian public opinion–indeed the entire political culture of his people–regards any pact that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state as a betrayal of their national identity, bringing Hamas back into the PA fold illustrated that he would not take the sort of risks that peacemaking required.

But given the PA’s almost complete dependency on the United States and Europe for the aid that keeps its corrupt apparatus operating, there was a genuine risk that the unity pact would generate a cutoff of assistance that could topple his kleptocracy. U.S. law mandated such a rupture of relations, as did the officially stated policy of the Obama administration that rightly regards Hamas as a terrorist group, not a legitimate political player. But there was a chance that Washington would accept a Palestinian deception in which technocrats would be appointed to rule in the name of the Fatah-Hamas coalition in order to pretend that the terrorists were not in charge.

In the weeks since the unity pact was concluded it wasn’t clear which way the U.S. would jump on the question of keeping the money flowing to Abbas, though at times Secretary of State John Kerry made appropriate noises at the PA leader about the danger of going into business with Hamas. But today’s press briefing at the State Department removed any doubt about President Obama’s intentions. When asked to react to today’s announcement of a new Fatah-Hamas government in Ramallah, spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the U.S. would accept the Palestinian trick. As the Times of Israel reports:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Monday that Washington believes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has “formed an interim technocratic government…that does not include members affiliated with Hamas.”

“With what we know now, we will work with this government,” Psaki said. She did, however, warn that the US “will continue to evaluate the composition and policies of the new government and if needed we’ll modify our approach.” She later added that the administration would be “watching carefully to make sure” that the unity government upholds the principles that serve as preconditions for continuing US aid to the Palestinian Authority.

In recognizing the fig leaf of a “technocratic” government that is meant to distract the world from the reality that Hamas is now in full partnership with Abbas, the Obama administration may think it has put Israel’s government—which publicly called for the world not to recognize the Palestinian coalition—into a corner. But by discarding its own principles about recognizing unrepentant terror groups, Obama has done more than betrayed Israel. He has betrayed the cause of peace.

It would be a mistake to waste much time debating whether the cabinet Abbas has presented to the world is not really affiliated with Hamas. The people he has appointed are nothing but stand-ins for the real power brokers in Palestinian politics—the leaders of Fatah who lord it over those portions of the West Bank under the sway of the PA and the Hamas chieftains who have ruled Gaza with an iron fist since the 2007 coup in which they seized power there. Just like Abbas’s previous attempt to swindle the West into thinking that the PA intended to embrace reform during Salam Fayyad’s ill-fated term as prime minister, the “technocratic” cabinet isn’t fooling anyone. Americans and Israelis may have lauded Fayyadism as a path to a responsible Palestinian government that would eschew corruption and try to actually improve the lives of its people. But Fayyad was a man without a political constituency and, despite the support he had in Washington, was thrown overboard by Abbas and the PA went back to business as usual without a backward glance.

Nor is there any use arguing about whether it is Hamas that has been co-opted by Abbas and Fatah rather than the other way around. The two rival parties have very different visions of Palestinian society with Hamas hoping to eventually install the same kind of theocratic rule in the West Bank that it established in the independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza. But at the moment there is no fundamental difference between the two on dealing with Israel. Despite its unwillingness to recognize Israel even in principle and its refusal to back away from its charter that calls for the Jewish state’s destruction and the slaughter of its people, Hamas doesn’t want an open war with Israel anymore than Fatah. But by the same token, Fatah has demonstrated repeatedly over the last 15 years that it is as incapable of making peace with Israel, even on terms that would have gained it sovereignty over almost all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem, as Hamas. The two parties are genuinely unified in their desire to keep chipping away at Israel’s international legitimacy and to avoid peace at any cost.

Admitting this would be a bitter pill for an Obama administration that has invested heavily in Abbas, a man they have wrongly portrayed as a peacemaker even as they have vilified Netanyahu as an obstacle to a deal. So rather than honestly assessing their policy and owning up to the fact that five and a half years of attempts to appease Abbas and tilt the diplomatic playing field in his direction have done nothing to make him say yes to peace, the administration will go along with the PA’s deception.

That’s a blow to Israel, which now finds itself more isolated than ever. But the real betrayal doesn’t involve Obama’s broken promises to the Jewish state or to pro-Israel voters. By buying into the myth that Hamas isn’t involved with the new PA government, the president is putting a spike into the last remote chances for a peace deal in the foreseeable future. So long as the Palestinians are allowed to believe that there is no price to be paid for rejecting peace, there will be no change in their attitudes. By allowing American taxpayer dollars to flow to a government controlled in part by Hamas, Obama is violating U.S. law. But he’s also signaling that the U.S. has no intention of ever pressuring the Palestinians to take the two-state solution they’ve been repeatedly offered by Israel and always rejected. For a president that is obsessed with his legacy, that’s a mistake for which history ought never to forgive him.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/06/02/obamas-embrace-of-hamas-betrays-peace-palestinians-us-aid-fatah/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!
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Surprised? Hamas moves in, US shrugs

...With a wink and a nod the restrictions passed by the US Congress disappear, as we knew they would, because the keystone of US policy in the Mideast is still, as it has been since the Arab oil boycott of the 1970s, to reverse the results of the Six Days War. Considering that if Israel had lost that war it most likely wouldn’t exist today, the decision to fund Hamas is perversely logical.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
02 June '14..

State Department briefing, today:

QUESTION: What is the U.S. Government’s view of the so-called Palestinian unity government that was sworn in today by Palestinian President Abbas?

MS. PSAKI: Well, at this point, it appears that President Abbas has formed an interim technocratic government that does not include ministers affiliated with Hamas. Moving forward, we will be judging this government by its actions. Based on what we know now, we intend to work with this government, but we’ll be watching closely to ensure that it upholds the principles that President Abbas reiterated today.

QUESTION: One follow-up on this.

MS. PSAKI: Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: When you say, “Based on what we know now, we intend to work with this government,” does that mean that based on what you know now, you intend to continue disbursing U.S. foreign assistance to the Palestinian Authority and this government?

MS. PSAKI: It does, but we will continue to evaluate the composition and policies of the new government and calibrate our approach accordingly.

Now, this is a “unity government,” and one of the partners is Hamas. All of the ministers were approved by Hamas, even if none of them comes to work wearing a Hamas headband, and it is unthinkable that Hamas will not have significant input into its decisions. The “technocratic government” is only a fig-leaf to allow the US and the rest of the ‘civilized’ world to ignore restrictions it placed on dealing with — and paying — murderous terrorists.

With a wink and a nod the restrictions passed by the US Congress disappear, as we knew they would, because the keystone of US policy in the Mideast is still, as it has been since the Arab oil boycott of the 1970s, to reverse the results of the Six Days War.

Considering that if Israel had lost that war it most likely wouldn’t exist today, the decision to fund Hamas is perversely logical.

Speaking out of both sides of the mouth depending on who's listening

...For those lacking the patience to click and watch the entire one minute and 11 seconds, Al-Habbash is hectoring his assembled audience of Palestinian Arab VIPs, including the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas who heads the PA, on how the young men who are pointlessly and violently laying down their murderous lives in the name of jihad in Syria ought to think again and go do it in Jerusalem.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
02 June '14..

Over at CIFwatch, they have an excellent post from this past Friday illustrating something that people who watch the Palestinian Arab political leadership know only too well. When an Arabic-speaking audience is focused on them, their message - tuned to the expectations of those hearing them - is frequently blood-and-guts violent, often vicious, using extremist language, imagery and exhortations. Put them in front of non-Arabic-speakers and they conjure up an entirely different, moderate, reasonable and cultured facade. The CIFwatch headline: "A perfect illustration of how the PA fools the UK media into believing they’re ‘pro-peace’":

The PA Minister of Religious Affairs was quoted recently in English criticizing violence and incitement and supporting peace. However, several months ago, in two separate speeches in Arabic, he called for terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and explained - as did Yasser Arafat before him – that the PA’s putative entreaties for peace are merely tactical decisions with the ultimate aim of vanquishing their Israeli ‘peace partners’.

The minister's name is Mahmoud Al-Habbash. As holder of the Waqf (Religious Affairs) portfolio, he has come out strongly and unequivocally - as he did a few days ago (see the evidence here in English) - against Hamas-style violence and incitement... just as most reasonable people would expect of a man with spiritual inclinations and responsibilities.

Most reasonable people would be wrong.

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(Video) Things That the Hamas-Side of the Unity Government Say

"Those who liberated Gaza, with the help of Allah, can liberate Jerusalem, the West Bank and the rest of Palestine (i.e., Israel)" [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), May 29, 2014]

Palestinian Media Watch..
Published on Jun 1, 2014..

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh: "We think that the path of negotiations and peace talks has reached a dead end. The resistance (i.e., terror campaign, 2000-2005), which liberated Gaza [in 2005] and protected Gaza, can liberate the West Bank and the rest of the Palestinian lands, Allah willing. The liberator of Gaza, with the help of Allah, can liberate Jerusalem, the West Bank and the rest of Palestine (i.e., Israel)."



[Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), May 29, 2014]

Bulletin: http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=11600
Video: http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=450&fld_id=450&doc_id=11599

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!
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More rocket fire by the terrorists of Gaza where (ahem) they "denounce violence"

...It's extraordinary how little media attention such acts of self-inflicted damage get. And how little awareness there is of the price paid by Gazan Arabs because of the jihadists' reckless disregard of the welfare of their own clansmen and family.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
01 June '14..

If they can overcome the squabbling about who gets to be named ministers [see "Disputes over portfolios delay announcement of Palestinian unification until Monday" in the Jerusalem Post], a Palestinian Arab "unity" government is about to be announced.

So says the PA's president Mahmoud Abbas according to several reports today. "Unity" means a regime which unites the Abbas Fatah and PLO groups with the outlawed terrorist organization, Hamas.

"The formation of the government would be the most significant step yet toward ending a crippling seven-year-old Palestinian political split. However, it is also bound to increase friction between Abbas and Israel’s hard-line government. Abbas said Saturday that he would respond to any Israeli punitive measures, such as withholding the monthly transfer of some $100 million in taxes and customs Israel collects on behalf of his Palestinian Authority. The funds are vital to keeping the self-rule government afloat... “We say (the government) is going to recognize Israel, denounce violence and recognize the international agreements,” he said, echoing the international community’s conditions for dealing with Hamas. “This is a technocrat government. It has nothing to do with Fatah, Hamas or any factions.” [National Post, today]

That's for Monday.

Meanwhile it's early Sunday morning here in Israel, and the news from the south of our country at this hour is focused on more immediate matters. A rocket, originating in the terrorism-addicted Gaza Strip which is controlled by Hamas, has just been fired into Israel [IDF Tweet], seeking - as always - Israeli victims.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out!

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Great question! Will American taxpayers keep building Hamas’ army?

...Now, however, Hamas will not need to employ the tactics of its 2007 coup in Gaza, when it shot Fatah supporters in the knees and pushed them off tall buildings (yes, if you are wondering, there are still some hard feelings in Fatah over this). It can proceed more or less peacefully and even democratically to take over the PA by winning elections. So does the PA still need an army? Will the US keep training its soldiers and equipping it? Who, after all, would they fight with it?

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
31 May '14..

On Monday, if we can believe Mahmoud Abbas, a Palestinian unity government will be formed by the two major factions, Fatah and Hamas. A ‘technocratic’ government will be formed immediately until elections can be held next year.

‘Technocratic’ is a great word. It suggest a government of people interested in economics, sanitation, education, etc., and not in launching rockets, kidnapping soldiers, or stuffing explosives into tunnels underneath the border. The classic technocrat is former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who proved too technocratic (read: opposed to corruption) even for Abbas. Somehow I’m not optimistic about finding many technocrats in either Fatah or Hamas.

Abbas claims that the policies of the new government will be the existing policies of the PA, which ostensibly include nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to prior agreements (please don’t laugh too loudly). Hamas explicitly rejects these conditions, and plans to retain its weapons and continue its “resistance.” Apparently the EU is satisfied with Abbas’ assurances and will continue supporting the PA.

What about the US? The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012 says that

None of the funds appropriated in titles III through VI of this Act may be obligated for salaries of personnel of the Palestinian Authority located in Gaza or may be obligated or expended for assistance to Hamas or any entity effectively controlled by Hamas, any power-sharing government of which Hamas is a member, or that results from an agreement with Hamas and over which Hamas exercises undue influence.

That would seem to mean that the US will have to stop sending US taxpayer money to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as soon as the unity government is established. This is strong, aggressive language, which probably gave some members of Congress and their constituents a warm feeling when it was passed.

But the law also contains a presidential waiver clause. The President can suspend the requirement for 6 months at a time if he thinks US national security requires it. Unlike the waiver clause in the Jerusalem Embassy act of 1995, which can be renewed indefinitely (and so far, has been), this one can’t be renewed after 12 months. So theoretically, unless Hamas turns into a bunny rabbit, the US will have to stop funding the PA, training its ‘security’ forces, etc. in at most a year.

The PA manages to absorb every dollar and euro it gets, while still barely managing to stave off insurrection. It would not survive without US aid.