Insatiable Extremism - Editorial
Israel is gone from Gaza. Yet Hamas has intensified its attacks on Israel. A mindset that loathes Israel more than it seeks its own freedom will not be remade by Israeli withdrawal or endless international funding and sympathy. A leadership inciting against Israel in its media, mosques and school system will not be rejected by the Palestinian public so long as much of that population is mired in a bigotry that inculcates permanent victimhood, refuses to recognize any shred of justice to Israel's sovereign claims, and extols the virtues of violence and death.
    What the Hamas-inspired murderous rocket fire across the Gaza border should long since have made plain to all is that even territory cleared of every last vestige of Israeli presence does not sate the appetite of the Islamists - who happen to constitute the parliamentary leadership freely elected by the Palestinian public. (Jerusalem Post)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, February 29, 2008]

Escalation of Terror in Gaza (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Beginning on Jan. 15 and over the next 24 hours, more than 100 rockets and mortars were fired by Palestinians from Gaza on the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon - indiscriminate fire raining down on Israeli civilians. A Hamas sniper murdered 20-year-old volunteer Carlos Chavez from Ecuador in the fields of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha using a special .50 caliber sniper rifle.

More than two years ago, Israel removed all of its civilians, soldiers and settlements from Gaza and redeployed behind the recognized border in order to promote a peaceful solution - yet in return received Hamas-backed terror.

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June, approximately 1,500 rockets and mortars have been launched at Israel. Israel has suffered dozens of casualties, hundreds of shock victims, thousands of traumatized children, and severe disruption of daily life.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, January 18, 2008]

June 2006: "We [Hamas] will rule the nations, by Allah's will, the USA will be conquered, Israel will be conquered, Rome and Britain will be conquered."  "Just as the Jews ran from Gaza . . . "

Jan 2006: Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar: "Israel is an enemy, not a partner or a friend or a neighbor. We won't negotiate with them and this is our final position. Palestine, all of Palestine, belongs to the Muslims and the Arabs and no one has the right to give up one inch of its land." Pres. Jimmy Carter thinks Hamas' pending role in Palestinian government is just great.

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Boaz Ganor: Israel is finding itself facing three of the most serious strategic threats it has known in the past ten years.

R. James Woolsey on PM Olmert's “Convergence”.  Foreseeable Consequences.

Syrian-based HAMAS "political leader" Khaled Meshaal:
    "Our battle is with two sides . . .  the United States, and the second is the strongest power in the region (Israel)....We will not be victorious unless the other side of the battle is Arab and Muslim."
 

June 2007 -- Hamas Overthrows Fatah -- Takes Gaza

Dangers of the Saudi Initiative - Zalman Shoval
The objective of the Saudi initiative is to diplomatically achieve everything the Arab world was unable to achieve through war and terror: The return of refugees and return to the borders of June 4, 1967, that invited aggression. And the Arabs are not relating to these issues as points for negotiation, but rather as a precondition to their actual willingness to engage in talks. Their refusal to make any amendments to the plan only confirms it.
    The Saudi initiative also seeks to convene a conference attended by the international Quartet (U.S., Europe, Russia, and the UN,) the Palestinians (namely, the Hamas government), and a new creature called "The Arab Quartet" (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE). In other words, Israel will find itself in a situation it has always tried to avoid: isolated in an international forum whose composition is bad. (Ynet News)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Apr 12, 2007]

Hamas: "The Extermination of the Jews Is Good for the World" - Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
The extermination of Jews is Allah's will and is for the benefit of all humanity, according to the Hamas paper Al-Risalah of April 23. Kan'an Ubayd explains that the suicide operations carried out by Hamas are committed solely to fulfill Allah's wishes. Furthermore, Allah demanded this action because "the extermination of the Jews is good for the inhabitants of the world." It should be noted that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "When I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." (Palestinian Media Watch)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, May 4, 2007]

Oct 20, 2006, Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar: “We will never recognize Israel, and the end the [fate of] Zionists will be like that of the Crusaders, the Persians and the English, who left. We want all of Palestine, every centimeter, from the river to the sea, from Rosh Hanikra to Rafah. If we can form a state within the 1967 borders we will do so, but this doesn’t mean that we will relinquish our right to every centimeter of Palestine’s land.

U.S. Wary of Palestinian Unity Government Plan - Paul Richter and Ken Ellingwood
Leaders of the radical Islamic Hamas and the rival Fatah faction announced this week that they were close to completing a deal they hoped would persuade the West to end an aid cutoff that had bankrupted the government and set off factional fighting. But U.S. officials noted Tuesday that the Palestinian proposal might not be enough to end the aid ban.
    An Israeli official said the deal seemed to be an effort to put a more presentable face on the government without making key changes or concessions, and that restoring aid would lift the pressure on Hamas just when the crunch was beginning to have an effect. "I think people in Washington are going to be pretty underwhelmed by it," said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Palestinians are "playing with words and trying to get the world to give them as much money as possible without being bound to anything."  (Los Angeles Times)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Sep 13, 2006]

Hamas' Strategy: "The Violence Will Never Stop" - Gabriela Keller
Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, second in command of the political Hamas leadership in Syria, said in an interview that the recent agreement with Fatah on the so-called Prisoners Document will "strengthen the resistance in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Aside from that, we have agreed on the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in these areas." When asked if that meant that Hamas inevitably accepts the Israeli state in the rest of the area, he replied: "The document does not say that at all." "No matter what, the violence will not stop." (Der Spiegel-Germany)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Jul 3, 2006]

Hamas: No Recognition of Israel   (BBC News)
Fatah and Hamas have reached agreement on a document outlining a common political strategy. However, Hamas negotiators have denied reports that the deal meant the militants would implicitly recognize Israel. Palestinian minister Abdel Rahman Zeidan said the Hamas-Fatah document did not in any way recognize the State of Israel. "You will not find one word in the document clearly stating the recognition of Israel as a state. Nobody has agreed to this," he said.
    Hamas negotiators told the BBC they believe that a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is a first step - not a final step. They believe that future generations of Palestinians will reclaim all their historic homeland. And that, in the end, there will be no room for what is now the Jewish State of Israel.
[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Jun 28, 2006]

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Apr 20, 2006]

Victim's Son: Dad Hugged Us Tightly
Philip Balhasan, 45, from Ashdod, traveled to Tel Aviv with his two children, Linor and Uri, after promising to buy them CDs and computer games for Passover. The family was standing next to the fast food stand at the time of the explosion. Uri recalled: "When we heard the blast, Dad wrapped his arms around me and Linor and hugged us tightly. Then he said 'grab the phone, call mom and tell her about the attack.'" Balhasan died on the way to the hospital. (Ynet News)
[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Apr 18, 2006]

How Hamas Greeted 9/11 - Steven Stalinsky
Hamas praised the killing of thousands of Americans in the attacks of September 11, 2001, while saying Muslims could not have been involved - a similar response to those of other groups in the Middle East. "Allah has answered our prayers," Dr. Atallah Abu Al-Subh wrote in an open letter titled "To America," which appeared September 13, 2001, in the Hamas mouthpiece Al-Risala. "The airplanes were [controlled] by the Jews," Hamas activist Yussef Al-'Azam wrote in the Hamas newspaper Al-Sabil on October 4, 2001. "Were the eradication of its Marines in Lebanon, the destruction of its military headquarters at Khobar in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of the USS Cole in Yemen, the bombing of its embassies in Zambia [sic] and in Kenya, and the attacks on its soldiers in the Gulf...not sufficient? The U.S. should have learned the lessons of history," the editor of Al-Risala, Dr. Ghazi Hamad, wrote days after 9/11. (New York Sun)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Apr 6, 2006]

Feb 2006: The new Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Ismail Haniyeh, “A Pragmatist":  In 2003, Hamas took credit for a horrific bus bombing in which 23 Israelis were killed. In response, Haniyeh was placed on Israel's most wanted list. He narrowly escaped an Israeli attack as he was meeting with Yassin and other terror leaders.

[Courtesy -- Honest Reporting]

Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal told a conference in Sudan: "Our mission is to liberate Jerusalem and purify the al-Aqsa Mosque."  2/14/06, Ynet News.

Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud Al-Zahar, "Our program is to liberate Palestine, all of Palestine....The Qassam Brigades will continue to increase in numbers, supplies, and weapons...until the liberation is completed."
"Anyone who thinks the calm means giving in is mistaken. The calm is in preparation for a new round of resistance and victory."  2/14/06, Jerusalem Post.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 14, 2006]

Hamas Leader Khaled Mash'al at Damascus Mosque: The Nation of Islam Will Sit at the Throne of the World and the West Will Be Full of Remorse

Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al's address at the Al-Murabit Mosque in Damascus on Feb. 3 was aired on Al-Jazeera TV: "We say to this West...you will be defeated in Palestine, and your defeat there has already begun....Israel will be defeated, and so will whoever supported or supports it....The nation of Muhammad is gaining victory in Palestine. The nation of Muhammad is gaining victory in Iraq, and it will be victorious in all Arab and Muslim lands....I say to the [European countries]: Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it." (MEMRI)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Feb 7, 2006]

Hamas Wins 76 of 132 Seats in Palestinian Council, Panel Says, Jan. 26, 2006 (Bloomberg)

Hamas, an Islamic group that has thwarted Middle East peace efforts with squads of suicide bombers, won a majority of 76 seats in yesterday's voting for the Palestinian legislature, the Central Elections Commission said.

Fatah Party, which has controlled the 132-seat Palestinian Legislative Council as well as the government of the Palestinian Authority for more than a decade, took 43 seats, Hanna Nasir, chairman of the election panel, said at a press conference late today in Ramallah. Voter turnout was 77 percent.

The victory shifted attention to whether Hamas would renounce its stated goal of Israel's destruction as it prepares to govern.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will ask Hamas to form a government without his own Fatah Party, Saeb Erakat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said today after the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, quit.

In Washington, President George W. Bush said he would like Abbas to stay on, and vowed that the U.S. wouldn't deal with Hamas [PAC comment:  Europe undoubtedly will] if it maintains its commitment to violence against Israel.

``Obviously people were not happy with the status quo,'' Bush said in assessing the election outcome. The vote indicated people were demanding ``honest government'' and improvements in education, health care and other public services, he told reporters.

Exit polls yesterday had given Fatah an edge in the vote, then early results during the night showed Hamas had won.

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Iran says Hamas 'earthquake' will shake US, Agence France Presse,

Fri Jan 27, 2006, 6:32 AM ET

Iran's regime said that the Palestinian election win of its Islamic militant allies Hamas was an "earthquake" that would also jolt its enemies in Washington.

"All the Muslims are happy, and God willing this earthquake... will be felt right up to the White House," hardline cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani said in an official weekly sermon at Tehran University on Friday.

Iran and Hamas are close allies and declared last month that they represented a "united front" against sworn enemy Israel.

"When you say democracy, it means people, and now people have spoken," the ayatollah said in comments directed at officials in Europe and the United States who have been pushing for democracy in the Middle East.

"How dare you so rudely stand against the people's vote? When you say that Hamas is a terrorist group, you are actually saying that the Palestinian people are terrorists."

Kashani also issued a call for Palestinian unity.

"I tell Hamas and Fatah that both of you have enemies. You should preserve this victory, do not oppose one another over the results, because if you oppose one another the enemy will be happy," he said.

Iran has already officially congratulated Hamas, which shares Iran's opposition to the peace process and the view that Israel has no right to exist.

The Rise Of Hamas And The Fall Of Palestine

End Game,
by Yossi Klein Halevi, TNR Online, 01.26.06

Here then is the real asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Precisely at the moment when a majority of the Israeli people has accepted not just the political necessity but moral legitimacy of a Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people empowers its most hateful and triumphalist ideology.

A two-fold spin has already begun. The first spin concerns Hamas. The same commentators who once assured us that power and responsibility would transform Yasir Arafat from terrorist to statesman now assure us that Hamas leaders similarly will be transformed by the process of governance. Fatah was supposed to control Hamas; now, presumably, Hamas will control itself.

And so get ready for the era of the wink and the hint. Experts will examine Hamas statements for signs of the slightest shift; they will ignore what Hamas tells its own people and celebrate every seemingly reasonable utterance to Western journalists. And Hamas leaders will readily oblige: They will speak of "peace," just as Arafat spoke of the peace of the brave. And the peace they will mean, as the bitter Israeli joke once went, is the peace of the grave.

The essence of Hamas is a commitment to destroy the religious affront of Jewish sovereignty. For Hamas to "moderate" would mean turning into an apostate of its own most sacred truth. If the process of moderation didn't happen to the less devout Fatah, which continues to reject Israel's legitimacy and now opposes terror only on temporary tactical grounds, it surely won't happen to Hamas.

The second spin concerns the Palestinian people. Palestinians, we're being told, didn't really intend to vote for the bad Hamas that blows up buses and promotes Holocaust denial and enshrines the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter. [The full version is here.] They were simply fed up with Fatah corruption and voted for the good Hamas that provides social benefits and a sense of discipline and purpose. True, Palestinians were understandably outraged at Fatah, which was the recipient of billions of dollars of foreign aid and managed in the last decade not to rehabilitate a single refugee camp. Yet to excuse the landslide vote for Hamas is to continue to patronize the Palestinian people, as most of the international community did through five years of suicide bombings. Palestinians voted for a movement for whom means and ends are identical: The suicide bombings are mini-preenactments of Hamas's genocidal impulse. Not to hold the Palestinians responsible for their fate, when they vote democratically, is to deny them the right to define themselves.

In truth, Hamas's victory doesn't mark the end of the peace process. That's because the peace process ended five years ago, when Arafat responded to Ehud Barak's peace overtures with the terror war. A recent poll asked Israelis the following question: If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, uproots the settlements, redivides Jerusalem, and signs a peace treaty with a Palestinian state, would the conflict end or would terror continue? Some 70 percent responded that the conflict would continue. And that was before the rise of Hamas. What the Hamas victory has ended, then, is the pretense of a peace process.

The rise of Hamas also marks the end of the era of the guilty Israeli conscience, which began during the first intifada in the late 1980s. Perhaps the most effective ally of the Palestinians in their quest for statehood was the realization among many Israelis that the Palestinians had rights and had been wronged. Over the last five years of terror, though, the Israeli guilty conscience has been steadily eroded. Now, none but the most deluded Israelis will continue to maintain that the conflict is about the occupation and the settlements rather than Israel's existence. As Dan Meridor, one of the Israeli negotiators at Camp David, put it, the peace process failed not because of a Palestinian state but because of a Jewish state.

What, then, is Israel going to do? There is a virtual national consensus to treat a Hamas government as no more legitimate than the Holocaust-denying, extermination-minded regime in Tehran. That consensus will hold.

Less certain is the fate of the unilateralist policy begun by Ariel Sharon in Gaza. The logic of unilateralism--that in the absence of a credible Palestinan partner, Israel must define its own borders--has never been more compelling. Yet, ironically, the consequences of unilateralism have never been more terrifying. Until the Hamas victory, those of us who supported further unilateral withdrawal hardly expected Fatah to control terror and rocket attacks from the evacuated territories, but could at least trust that Fatah would try to prevent Iranian penetration, if only to ensure its continued rule. Now, though, any territory Israel evacuates will almost certainly become a frontline base for Iran. The operative result of the Hamas victory, then, is that Tehran has just moved several thousand kilometers closer to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In fact, Israel is now surrounded by Iranian proxies--Hizballah to the north and Hamas to the south and east.

As untenable as Israel's options have now become, the more enduring tragedy belongs to the Palestinian people. Palestinians have chosen rejectionism after being handed the entirety of Gaza as an experiment in Palestinian sovereignty. Electing Hamas, then, may well be the historical equivalent of the Palestinian rejection of U.N. partition in 1947.

Palestinians have delivered their next generation to Moloch, to a movement whose religious pageants include parading children dressed as suicide bombers. The celebration of mass murderers as religious martyrs and educational role models, promoted by both Fatah and Hamas, has now reached its inevitable conclusion in the national suicide of the Palestinian people.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a TNR foreign correspondent and senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
 

Hyperlinks and emphasis added by PAC

Hamas and 'peace'

TODAY'S EDITORIAL, The Washington Times, January 30, 2006

In the wake of the Hamas victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, Washington is already under pressure to emulate the wrong-headed policies of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when American policy-makers labored to persuade Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization to say they recognized Israel's right to exist.

After the PLO collaborated in Saddam Hussein's brutal subjugation of Kuwait, and Saddam was defeated in the first Gulf war, the drumbeat of demands that the United States persuade Israel to negotiate with Mr. Arafat intensified. Israel eventually elected a government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that was dovish enough to take the risk. The result was the 1993 Oslo Accords and the endless and naive "peace process" that followed: seven years of substantial Israeli political and territorial concessions to Mr. Arafat in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, in exchange for the PLO leader's empty promises to end the conflict with Israel and to prevent Palestinian terrorism.

The process, seriously flawed to begin with, collapsed in the summer and fall of 2000, when Mr. Arafat rejected the generous compromise offered him at Camp David by President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Then he went to war. Now, more than five years later, with Hamas having defeated Mr. Arafat's old Fatah organization, there is a new drumbeat of demands that Washington court Hamas -- in other words, that we repeat what failed.

President Bush's initial response to Hamas' victory was to urge Mr. Arafat's successor as leader of the Fatah movement, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to stay in office to work with Hamas. That's the wrong way to go. In voting for Hamas candidates, the Palestinians made their decision and they must live with the consequences. There's nothing to be gained by papering over these differences by encouraging an emasculated Mr. Abbas to stay on in a fraudulent "continuity." Similarly, it makes no sense to go chasing after the likes of Hamas boss Mohammed Zohhar, to cajole him into making a meaningless statement laden with caveats about continuing "a ceasefire" with Israel -- even as Hamas and its terrorist allies fire Qassam rockets into Israel and prepare for a new round of terrorist strikes against the Jewish state.

Washington should have contact of some kind with any government elected by the Palestinians -- even a government mismanaged by Hamas. But such contact should be severely limited, and, as was the case under Fatah, aid should go only to nongovernmental organizations that support human rights and democratic reform. Hamas has received substantial aid from Iran and wealthy Saudi sheikhs, enabling its terrorist network and social-service operations to flourish. [Pac comment: Saudi government too.]  Washington and the European Union should never, ever, subsidize Mr. Zohhar and his ilk.
    
Hyperlinks and emphasis added by PAC

Fruits of disengagement, Ynet Opinion, Jan, 9, 2006 ,Yaakov Amidror
More than 80 percent of Palestinians credit Hamas terror with pushing Israel out of Gaza


Essentially, Hamas won this election because it presented Palestinian voters with a less corrupt alternative than the existing Palestinian Authority, and one that could point to concrete achievements: A strong social network (called "Da'avah" in Arabic) that provides civilian services rather than steal them, and a successful terrorist network that brought about Israel's complete exit from the Gaza Strip.

The groundwork for these two achievements was laid by Israeli decisions.

The Oslo accords brought a corrupt group to power; a group that did everything it could to get rich on the public purse. It cheated its people and destroyed everything that was good about a Palestinian society that made initial strides, huge by Arab standards, towards building a "civil society."

In hindsight, it was a terrible mistake to accept these people as partners to the diplomatic process, and to allow them to gain a foothold on the ground and to impose them on the Palestinians.

20-20 hindsight

Today, more than a decade after Arafat and his security forces arrived in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, we can say conclusively that the experiment has been rejected – Arafat's cronies have been humiliated in democratic elections.

What would the result have been if Rabin's Israel hadn't buckled to the world view of Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin? There's no way of knowing.

But it is clear what the Oslo concept brought us: Bloodshed (more than 130 Israeli deaths in the month before Operation Defensive Shield in April, 2002) and a Hamas government.

Disengagement and Hamas

But we must admit that Israel itself contributed greatly to Hamas’ electoral success by pulling out unilaterally from Gaza. Flight at a time of war and abdication of basic principles at a time when terror continued unabated brought tremendous success to those responsible.

And so instead of approaching the elections humiliated and degraded because of the unqualified failure of their policy to bear fruit in Judea and Samaria – Hamas members became Palestinian heroes.

More than 80 percent of Palestinians believe Hamas and its terrorism forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza. What Israel's believe is "determination" is interpreted in Gaza as "weakness."

One of Hamas' most predominant slogans in Gaza was, "Four years of terror brought more than 10 years of talks." From the Palestinian point of view, this was a true and successful slogan. It emphasized the failure of the Israeli government and the success of Hamas.

Not so bad?

One had to hear Dr. Robert Satloff, the executive director of The Washington Institute, address the Herzliya Conference last week in order to understand just how badly – from an American point of view – the Israeli government erred in all its preparations for the possibility that Hamas would take part in the Palestinian elections.

He said Israel, the United States and Egypt squandered a historic opportunity to prevent the domination of radical Islam over the Palestinian elections. Turns out the same arrogance that brought about unilateral disengagement, as described by the state comptroller, also set the tone for the government's steps with everything related to the Palestinian elections.

This is the time for Israel to signify, via its actions and behavior, the complete rejection of Hamas as a terrorist group and that no one will negotiate with it.

I wouldn't be surprised it we started to hear explanations about how its "not so bad" that "Hamas will moderate when they take power," that "we're already hearing new voices emanating from that camp," and that "the ones who carry out terror attacks are not the same ones as those sitting in government."

In short, once again we have engaged in self-deception – of the same sort that was given red-carpet treatment following Oslo. But now, instead of interpreting Arafat, they are interpreting Hamas. And all in order to sell us the same deception, wrapped up in easy-to-digest packaging.

The surprising thing is that most of us will even buy the story and will want to believe them.

 Local, international fallout

Locally, this sort of approach could even negatively influence our struggle against the existence of terror commanders in Damascus and efforts to disarm Hizbullah.

In the wider arena, we are likely to pay for this in the strategic realm as well, when many countries make point to our wishy-washy approach to Hamas when justifying nuclear concessions to Iran.

If Israel fails to act strongly to impose a total ban on Hamas, it will open up a Pandora's Box that will be impossible to predict just where it will lead.

Several days ago Iran's president met with Hamas leaders in Damascus. The deal signed between radical Sunnis and radical Shiites is nothing new.

Most of their efforts are directed against Israel. In this case Israel must not give up even a little of its ability to defend itself.

This is the reason it is important to bring the issue of "defensible borders" back to the public debate - first of all here in Israel.

The issue is critical for our survival here.

Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror is former head of the IDF's National Defense College and is currently the vice-president of the Lander Academic College in Jerusalem

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Believe it: Hamas target is Israel, Richard Cohen, Jan. 30, 2006, New York Daily News

While it is probably true that Hamas won the recent Palestinian elections not because it promised to wipe out Israel, but because it promised to pick up the garbage in Gaza City, it is also true that the prospect of increased violence did not deter the average Palestinian from voting for Hamas. History has seen this sort of thing before. The rule - the only rule - is to take zealots at their word.

If you would have asked a random German in, say, 1932 if he was voting for the murder of Jews, he would have said, "Nein!" What he really wanted was an end to the brawling in the streets and a big thumbs-up to traditional German culture.

I saved for this paragraph any reference to Hitler so as to postpone the reflexive outburst of "Nothing can be compared to the Nazis!" Normally, I agree, and I usually shy from such comparisons. But I am not likening Hamas or Islamist militancy to Nazism, I am only likening the mind of one sort of zealot to another.

They mean what they say. For the Nazi, it was all in their bible, "Mein Kampf," and in their rallies and speeches. It took some effort to overlook their stated intentions, but a considerable number of people managed to do so and later professed shock at what happened. They looked into the abyss, saw nothing that concerned them personally - and went back to sleep.

In due course we will be told that what Hamas has been insisting on for years - the utter destruction of Israel - is not really a serious goal. Hamas will be forced to moderate by the reality of governing. As for its truculent anti-Semitism - not to be confused in this case with anti-Zionism - it will be dismissed as without consequence. Hamas will have to deal with reality - and Israel, in the region, is the mightiest reality of them all. Yasser Arafat came to understand that.

But Arafat's Fatah movement was secular and nationalistic. Hamas, on the other hand, can be traced back to the Muslim Brotherhood and its 1928 declaration: "The Koran Is Our Constitution." It gleefully sends people off to their death as suicide bombers, spackling the walls of Tel Aviv restaurants with the flesh of the innocent while assuring the bombers a place in paradise. This is terrifying. That is the whole idea.

The continual mistake of the Bush administration is to think, based on not much thinking to begin with, that people are people - pretty much the same the world over. This is why the President extols democracy. It must be what everyone wants because it is what everyone here wants. But Toto knows the truth. The Middle East is not Kansas.

The leaders of Hamas brim with the word of God and the certainty of their cause. From here on they will lie about their ultimate aim and smilingly assure us that what they have always said they no longer mean. All over the world, people will believe them and urge the U.S. and Israel to do the same. Take my word for this. Anyone can see the future. It's all in the past.

 

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We don't need any favors

Haartez, Jan 31, 2006, Yoel Marcus

Yaakov Herzog, an Israeli diplomat and intellectual who was also Golda Meir's closest adviser, was once invited by the BBC to take part in a symposium. The subject: How long will Israel survive? Herzog declined. In a polite but sarcastic letter of response he wrote that he would be delighted to participate in a symposium on how long the British Empire would survive. This anecdote, passed down over the years, has suddenly taken on new relevance since Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority elections.

This is not what the Americans and Europeans had in mind when they demanded democracy from the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is a bloodthirsty gang of Islamic fundamentalists whose charter, signed in 1998, after the Oslo Accords and after Arafat came to Israel, explicitly calls for Israel's destruction. It not only refuses to negotiate with Israel at any stage or under any circumstances, but refuses to recognize its existence.

Hamas' surprise electoral victory is a kick in the teeth to all who were hoping for a peace agreement. Now President Bush and the leaders of Europe are saying that if Hamas wants to be part of the government, it will have to recognize Israel's right to exist. The very idea that the whole world is down on its knees, begging a Koran-centric organization whose goals are achieved by murdering Jews to recognize Israel's right to exist, is insulting. Israel is the only state in the world that's been on the map for 58 years and still has no permanent borders. The establishment of Israel was declared in May 1948 on the strength of the UN Partition Plan - a proposal the Arabs rejected. They live with the miserable consequences of that decision until today. Within a day of Israel's Declaration of Independence, the two global superpowers recognized it. A year later, it was accepted as a member of the United Nations, the 51st country out of a total of 190. Israel maintains diplomatic relations with 170 of them.

Nevertheless, Israel is the only democracy in the world that has been fighting from the day it was born to safeguard its national security and to be recognized once and for all. It is frustrating and infuriating when fanatic, backward countries declare that Israel, one of the most stable, progressive democracies in the world, has no right to exist. It wasn't the president of Iran who invented the idea of shipping the Jews of Israel back to where they came from in Europe. Ahmed Shukeiry, secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization, beat him to it in a series of rabid interviews on Cairo Radio before the Six-Day War.

Israel doesn't need permission to exist, certainly not from the primitive, fundamentalist societies that live around it. Israel is perceived as one of the strongest, stablest, most technologically advanced countries in the world, not least in view of where it stands on the list of nuclear powers. So who is it, exactly, who thinks they can destroy us? Hamas? Hizballah? Islamic Jihad? Why does Israel have to be in this situation altogether, pleading with the Arabs for recognition?

Many take off their hat to a nation that has spent decades confronting terrorism and war but has managed to chalk up incredible achievements in every sphere despite it all. When partners were found, Israel knew how to make the "peace of the brave" with its fiercest enemies, although it had to bend and make tremendous concessions. Israelis have stood up admirably and bravely in the face of suicide bombings and other acts of terror perpetrated by Islamic militants, dredging up the emotional strength to return to normal life after every blow.

The victory of Hamas is, first and foremost, the problem of the Palestinians themselves. Precisely now, when a political system is taking shape in Israel that has enough electoral clout to reach an agreement, it would be foolish for the Palestinians to wreck their chances again because of the rise of some fanatic party that is not prepared to accept Israel's existence, let alone speak to it.

Swayed by fundamentalism in one guise or another, the Palestinians have been paying for their obstinacy, their extremist policies and their mistakes for many decades. We will go on living and flourishing even without the recognition of Hamas. We don't need any favors.
 

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A vote for Islam -The conventional wisdom has it that Palestinians chose Hamas despite its Islamist platform. Conversations with voters in the West Bank, however, reveal that many chose Hamas because of it.

The Boston Globe, Thanassis Cambanis, February 5, 2006

AROUB REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank --Here at the grass roots of Palestinian society, the imam of the local mosque is unequivocal about the root of Hamas's appeal: strict, unyielding Islamic faith.

Nizar Aweidat, 27, doesn't look the part of a typical cleric, wearing the frayed, plaid, buttoned-down shirt favored by secular Palestinians and a faint strip of peach fuzz on his upper lip instead of a beard. But Aweidat has shepherded a surge of support for Hamas in this tiny refugee camp that once unanimously supported the secular Fatah faction.

Fatah suffered a stunning defeat in the Jan. 25 Palestinian legislative elections, in part because of the success men like Aweidat have had in luring voters to Hamas. How Aweidat lured those voters is instructive: He attracted supporters not through the web of social services typically cited as the source of Hamas's appeal, or with talk of the extravagances of Fatah, but through religion.

''Fatah doesn't tell people to pray. This contradicts the Koranic verses which say that my prayer, my devotion, my life, and my death are for God," Aweidat explained. ''Life should be colored by Islam. Hamas has a comprehensive theory of society and life, dealing with everything through its vision of Islam."

The conventional wisdom says it's the other way around, that Palestinians turned to Hamas because they were fed up with corruption and instability, or disappointed with the peace process-and that they embraced Hamas despite the party's Islamist platform. Virtually everyone following the Palestinian election-Palestinian academics, politicians allied with Fatah, and even the Israeli military and Western diplomats-bought into this wisdom. The prediction was that Hamas would capture at best a third of the seats in the Palestinian legislature.

How is it that these analysts all made the same mistake? Part of the explanation lies in the tendency of the largely secular Palestinian elite to underestimate the strength of Islamism. Influential Palestinian analysts predicted that Hamas could never win a majority, because its extremist religious views-and its commitment to unending war with Israel-would not resonate with the Palestinian public.

Khalil Shikaki, the Palestinian pollster considered the most reliable monitor of public opinion in Gaza and the West Bank, was caught off guard by the election results. After more than a decade of public opinion research, Shikaki still believes that liberal democracy has strong support among Palestinians, and says that Hamas ''will find resistance from the public if they try to impose their social agenda," which is based on a strict adherence to the Koran and would, among other things, ban alcohol and curtail the rights of Palestinian women. But even Shikaki admitted this week that when it came to the election, ''we got it completely wrong."

. . .

In small places like Aroub refugee camp and in large cities like Nablus and Gaza City, Hamas makes its first mark on communities by organizing Koran classes, drawing its core membership from those who respond to the call to practice a more active Islam.

Growing up in the Aroub camp, Aweidat said, he and his parents rarely attended prayers, except on Fridays. In three years as the camp's imam, Aweidat has watched turnout at the daily prayers swell from 30 people to 150.

Aweidat first encountered ''the Islamic awakening" at a Hamas tutorial in the camp. He devoured pamphlets and writings about Islam and eventually left to obtain a degree in Islamic studies from Al-Najah University in Nablus. He returned to the cluster of two-story concrete apartment blocks, nestled at the foot of the Hebron hills and home to 10,000 people, to bring people ''closer to God."

''Hamas's role is to spread Islamic education," Aweidat said. The other popular planks in the Hamas platform, like helping the poor and fighting corruption, are secondary byproducts of the religious agenda, he said.

Interviews in the West Bank and Gaza over the past six months seem to bear out Aweidat's claims. Most Hamas voters described themselves as committed, religious Muslims who supported Hamas first because of its religious credentials and then because of its promises to provide more services and curtail corruption.

''God willing, we will have an Islamic republic here," said Hussein Ibrahim Hussein, 39, a fruit dealer in Nablus. Hussein said he doesn't consider himself an Islamist, nor is he officially a member of Hamas. But he voted for Hamas because he thinks the faction will behave responsibly-ruling wisely and distributing resources fairly-due to its adherence to Islamic doctrine.

All over the Palestinian territories, Islam has been on the upswing. Over the past decade, as Hamas has become the indisputable power in Gaza, the city's famed nightclubs have disappeared. This past New Year's Eve, militants burned down the UN Club, the last place in Gaza that served alcohol. The majority of women, even secular women, now wear the hijab, or head scarf, a comparatively rare sight two decades ago.

Palestinian women still pride themselves on playing a more central role in political life than women in other Arab countries, and indeed Hamas fielded more than a dozen women candidates. But even the presence of these women in the Hamas ranks might be as much an indication of Islam's widening appeal as a sign of nascent liberalism. The women who ran under the Hamas banner included not just the traditional widows of ''martyrs," but also professional women with careers as teachers, professors, and pharmacists-a sign that Hamas's influence extends throughout all sectors of Palestinian society. Increasingly, Hamas's leading activists are lawyers, businesspeople, and academics, as evinced by their slate packed with white-collar candidates, and by the audiences seen at daily and Friday prayers in Hamas mosques.

In cities where urban professionals predominate, Hamas did especially well, even winning most of the seats in East Jerusalem. Their candidates included a host of doctors, lawyers, and engineers, who steadfastly presented themselves as ''new Islamists"-not rural imams with beards, but clean-cut technocrats also committed to their religious faith.

. . .

Hamas's victory comes as Islamic movements are gathering momentum across the region, dominating opposition politics in Egypt and Jordan and gaining ground among traditionally secular Kurdish and Sunni Arab communities in Iraq.

''In the whole region, people are becoming more religious," said Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Birzeit University outside Ramallah. He was more bullish about Hamas's prospects than most of his colleagues, but he never expected the faction to win as many votes as it did. ''Everybody was wrong," he said.

In part, that might be because outsiders looking for insight into Palestinian politics regularly turn to a pair of Palestinian pollsters-Shikaki and the head of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, Nabil Kukali-and the English-speaking political science professors at Birzeit and Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. These scholars work closely with foreign academics (and indeed many were trained in the West) and frequently confer with Israeli colleagues and international NGOs. Perhaps because of the cosmopolitan, secular milieu in which they operate, many of them have underplayed the emergence in the last decade of a potent strain of Islamism growing in popularity among the public they study.

Shikaki still interprets the vote as a backlash against Fatah, not a wave of support for Hamas. ''I think most people don't expect Hamas to create an Islamic state," Shikaki said. Most observers don't seem to expect that, and to be sure, secularism still runs strong in Palestinian society. Even among Islamists there is debate about how Islamic Palestine should be. Then again, Shikaki and those who rely on his information didn't expect Hamas to win a landslide victory.

Thanassis Cambanis is co-chief of the Globe's Middle East bureau.

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'We never willingly killed the innocent', Surviving members of the 'Stern Gang' reject comparisons with today's Hamas, By Murray Richtel, The Daily Camera, February 26, 2006

Will Hamas reject terrorism and recognize Israel's right to exist? That is the critical question yet to be answered following the recent Palestinian election.

Some analysts suggest Hamas will, drawing a parallel between it and the Stern Gang, a clandestine Jewish group that terrorized the British in Palestine prior to the establishment of Israel.

I found those analyses fanciful, similar to the claim made by apologists for Palestinian terrorism that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But they made me wonder how former Sternists would feel about the comparison to Hamas, and so, looking for answers, I sought them out. To a person, the old fighters I interviewed were outraged at the Hamas comparison.

The Stern Gang, derisively named by the British for its founder, Abraham Stern, adhered to his philosophy of personal terror in pursuit of its goal: the creation of an independent Jewish state. Its members carried on a campaign of bombings and assassinations that were strongly condemned by the mainstream Jewish community.

They called themselves LEHI, the Hebrew acronym for the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. But with the founding of Israel, they put down their arms, some entered politics, and one of their underground leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, went on to become Israel's Prime Minister.

LEHI maintained a strict secrecy policy, operating in small cells, its members known to each other only by code names, in order to frustrate the unrelenting British effort to track them down and destroy their organization. Because privacy remains important to the individuals with whom I spoke, I have referred to them by fictitious names.

Amos, decorated by the British as a war hero for his service behind German lines, was one of the more than 25,000 Jewish Palestinians who served in the British Armed Forces in World War Il. In 1943 he was granted a leave from service in Cairo and returned to Palestine.

Now 92 years old, wearing a green cotton sweat suit and sporting two days of gray stubble on his cheeks and chin and a full head of hair, Amos described in perfect English his role in one of LEHI's most infamous operations, the assassination in Cairo in 1944 of Lord Moyne, then the highest ranking British civilian in the Middle-East. Shamir, LEHI's Director of Operations, ordered Amos, who would return to Egypt after his leave, to establish an organization capable of killing Moyne.

I asked him what he thought of the notion that one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. A pensive Amos hesitated and then responded, "I agree there is a subjective element in the way you look at these things." But he added with emphasis, "killing men and women drinking coffee, it is not possible to compare."

Admitting that when he ran LEHI's postwar operation in America, he had sent dynamite from Chicago to a colleague in London who used it in a LEHI letter bomb assassination, he told me: "We didn't blow up cinemas in London. We could have, but we didn't want innocents to die. We never willingly killed the innocent."

Irit is a friend and admirer of Amos. She is the daughter of a talmudic scholar, still effervescent, attractive and stylish at age 76. Initially, she did not mention her rather tangential involvement in the assassination in 1948 of Count Bernadotte, a United Nations peace negotiator. It was only when I pressed her for information about her most dangerous underground activity that she reluctantly gave me a scintilla of information about it.

But she was eager to discuss the Hamas question, and did so with passion:

"All along they compared us to suicide bombers. The most important thing to remember is that we never hit innocent people. We never touched the families of high officers and we knew exactly where they were. It simply never entered our minds. it was important to hit only those who continued British policies, stopping us from establishing our nation. We were acting against a foreign occupier."

To my suggestion that Irit's last comment sounded like a Hamas claim, I got answers from two other LEHI members, Shoshi and Eyal.

Shoshi, whose first husband was killed in the famous Acre Prison escape in 1947, had been given every possible LEHI assignment, including assassination.

She claimed: "Our longing was to build a Jewish state. We were fighting for land described in the Bible as being for the children of Israel. It was never any kind of independent country for the Palestinians. They never seriously claimed that before we got here. When we came here the Arabs didn't call themselves Palestinians."

I responded that It still seemed like a claim to land being made by the occupied to the occupier.

Her retort: "Even our enemies knew it was ours. I remember in Germany in 1933 the cries — 'Jews to Palestine' — all the Christian World knew it was our state. I heard it in Belgium too. The whole world said go to your own country."

She continued: "Yes we used terrorism. But our terrorism is far away from nowadays terrorism and we had a moral barrier. We planned an operation so as not to involve the innocent. There are always surprises, but if it happened, it was unplanned. I am lucky I didn't have to kill. I was sent to assassinate a soldier but he was with a friend and I didn't shoot. Unlike the Germans, our orders were that we had the authority not to follow orders if that was right thing to do. There is no comparison, what they do now is not human and it is cruel."

Eyal is a gigantic man, 83 years old. Conversation with him is made difficult by his hearing loss, suffered when the bomb he was working on for LEHI exploded.

He echoed Shoshi, insisting that many LEHI operations were canceled when there was a risk to innocent civilians. He added that because each LEHI fighter had a duty to think for himself, a fighter suffered no punishment for aborting an operation under those circumstances.

Like Shoshi, he told me: "This is the most essential difference, they fight for God and we fought for the land."

I challenged him: I see no difference. Your claim to the land stems from the Bible and that sounds like to me fighting for God.

His response: "I was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Germany. For 11 years I thought I was a German, then Hitler came and they told me you are a Jew, you can't be a German. If this is not my country, where can I find a country. I am a patriot, not religious. This is not a country for God, It is for the Jewish people and that is why I fought. It is my home."

Yasmine gave me insight into the LEHI perspective on martyrdom. When I first arranged to meet her for coffee in a Jerusalem mall, I asked how I would recognize her. She told me she was a "fat, old Jewish lady." The person I met was a full of life seventy-eight year old, with a twinkle in her eye and a fiery spirit.

She recounted that by age 17, she had pasted forbidden LEHI posters on Jerusalem billboards, smuggled arms past British sentries, traced the movement of His Majesty's soldiers through Jerusalem streets, and ridden troop trains throughout Mandate Palestine, recording their timing and movements in an effort to assist the Stern Gang's sabotage campaign against the railroads.

But she wanted to do more, she wanted to be a real fighter. Finally, when her superiors recognized her fearlessness and zeal, she got her wish. They asked her to assassinate General Barker, the British Commanding General in Palestine.

And so Yasmine staked out Barker. On a daily basis, she walked back and forth in front of his residence dressed as a nurse pushing a baby carriage containing a blanket covered doll. The plan was to work out the timing so that Yasmine could escape after detonating a bomb, substituted for the doll, that would kill Barker. To Yasmine's disappointment, the plan was abandoned when she could not satisfy her handlers that she could carry out the operation without herself being killed. LEHI, she asserted, would never have engaged in an operation that put their fighters or civilians at risk, and the idea of a suicide mission was beyond their comprehension.

I tried to understand how this charming woman had been willing to kill. Yasmine explained she had no qualms about killing a British soldier or police officer if that would have caused mothers in England to demand that the government bring their sons home and help to get the British out of Palestine.

But on the killing of women and children and the Hamas comparison, she was adamant. "We didn't kill even one child," she told me. She opined that LEHI could have saved its members sent to the British gallows for carrying illegal weapons by kidnapping British women and children to use as hostages for prisoner exchanges. But harming children, "never, never, never-it is so brutal."

That LEHI's central goal was the creation of an independent Jewish State in Palestine is clear. Beyond that, the story of LEHI is complex and controversial.

The vast majority of the Jewish population in pre-state Israel condemned LEHI's tactics, though certainly not its ultimate goal. And there is no agreement among historians about the significance of LEHI 's contribution to the establishment of Israel. Nor is there agreement about what occurred in the 1948 attack on Deir Yassin, an Arab village near Jerusalem, carried out by LEHI and another Jewish underground organization, where innocent civilians were killed, although even LEHI's harshest objective critics accept that Deir Yassin was a military operation gone bad.

I do not know how Hamas would have responded to my inquiry. But I know what Hamas continues to say in its charter: "Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it — there is no solution to the Palestinian question except through Jihad." And I know what it has done — it has carried out dozens of bus and restaurant bombings right here in Jerusalem and dozens more all over Israel, targeting not soldiers and policemen, but families out to dinner or kids going home from school.

While aspects of LEHI's record continue to be debated by historians, the old Sternists' insistence that the perceived parallel between them and Hamas ignores the most critical and morally significant distinction between the two groups is compelling: Only Hamas uses indiscriminate terror against women, children and other innocents as a regular instrument of its war, and encourages its followers to commit acts of martyrdom in aid of its cause.

Murray Richtel was a district court judge in Boulder from 1977 to 1996. He holds dual citizenship in the United States and Israel.

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