We are always told that it is better to deal
with “the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. Put another way, given the
example of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq
or civil war in Syria,
the known is always preferable to the unknown?
It is a statement too often expressed. I do not understand why.
HAMAS is a reactionary
Muslim fundamentalist political entity. It has what I call a “Hitler Complex”.
This means that HAMAS is so sure of its own
theological infallibility it is willing to sacrifice its own population in a
destructive war to first humiliate its enemy and then, to destroy it,
utterly. It does not view the suffering
of its people as an issue nor is time a factor for consideration in how long is
needed to achieve victory. The only
possible issue that may make HAMAS pause, but never stop, is the possibility of
being overthrown. In order to achieve victory HAMAS must retain control, which
is why they executed dozens of ordinary Palestinians for protesting against the
war being waged from their front yards.
Ben Caspit, writing in Ma’ariv on the 14th
of August explained the HAMAS strategy thus: No agreement is possible unless it
is on their terms, no deterrence will affect their goal. The Islamic nation
must govern Palestine
“From the River to the Sea”. It’s
supporters in the West are often heard in demonstrations chanting this
genocidal slogan. Ben Caspit concludes by stating that “The only way to break
the cycle of conflict is by removing the irritant completely.”
HAMAS have fought a war of attrition (with
mortars, missiles and terror attacks) against Israel
since their consolidation of rule in Gaza
in 2007. Between the Palestinian
Authority and HAMAS there was little choice. The PA was and is a racist,
misogynistic and hate driven organisation fuelled by greed. It has received billions of dollars in aid
since its formal return from exile.
Exchanging a secular but corrupt government with a theocratic but
corrupt government was at best, unfortunate.
Major-General (res.) Giora Eiland (former head of Israel's
National Security Council) writing in an Op-ed that was published in Ynet news
on the fifth of August stated that Gazans are to blame for their situation just
like Germans were to blame for electing Hitler.
It is certainly sad but true. And the PA is no more deserving of trust now
than when it lost control of Gaza
to HAMAS.
The issue for Israel is that it seems incapable
of fighting this war with any strategy that extends beyond the next military
flare up. Its international Hasbara efforts are barely discernible and its
professional cadre of PR people are almost incapable of scoring points in the
propaganda war when dealing with hostile news agencies or journalists.
Israel’s victory in Operation Protective
Edge must be absolute. HAMAS must be overthrown. Israel
has to address the psychological war being waged against all of us, and not
only the war being waged against Israel. The threat of an expanding boycott is meant
to ensure that Israel’s
military victory is a Pyrrhic victory.
By demoralising Israel’s
supporters and demonstrating the steadfastness of opposition to the Jewish state
it is a reminder to Israel
and all of us in the Diaspora of our vulnerability.
Resurgent antisemitism? This is our punishment
for ‘disobedience’. There is much criticism on the Left about Israel’s own issue of religious intolerance and
the ‘Settlements’, and not just outside Israel. Israel has its fair share of near-sighted
policies. By not confronting religious
intolerance, by not rejecting any attempt to impose a narrow particularistic template
on society we encourage social exclusion, not diversity. But by
ignoring religious issues in the greater Near-East we do ourselves no favours.
Islam is a deeply hostile, colonialist faith and unless we draw attention to
this fact we cannot negotiate as equals.
Dealing with the political issue first will not
defuse the religious issues because they are intertwined. When Jews, as Israeli’s, are informed that
Jerusalem is a Jewish fiction, that they have no rights other than as ‘paying
tourists’ then this is more than a negotiating tactic. It is contemptuous
disregard for over a thousand years of persecution under Islam and three
thousand years of Jewish history.
In historical terms Judaism is not a
colonialist faith, nor is Zionism. Zionism was guilty of incredible naivety in
thinking that a Jewish-Arab Utopia was possible or that radicals on the
Arab-Muslim political-religious continuum would ever accept Jewish
self-determination. But after 47 years
in Judea and Samaria the lack of political will in policing the settlement
enterprise has demonstrated to both Israeli’s and the outside world that the
radicals are allowed to control the agenda.
That is not colonialism. It is political cowardice and an unforgivable
ignorance of history. Whether territory
is disputed or occupied loses relevance as a legal term when the political will
to control unregulated settlement is completely absent. That is when the term
‘colonialism’ becomes difficult to argue against.
Israel has failed to address the
centrality of an antisemitic narrative to Muslim - Arab negotiations. When it is clearly an everyday part of social
discourse it is inevitable that it will seep into and inexorably suffuse the
negotiating position of Israel’s
enemies. Under circumstances such as these an enemy negotiating from a position
of perceived international political advantage can not be trusted.
What is important is how we behave within our
separate societies. Trust has to be
developed. If we cannot explain the
injustice that we have internalised how can we explain it to the doubters within
the international community?
To return to the question of HAMAS, I can only
repeat what Ben Caspit expressed. When an enemy is determined to break you, negotiations
become no more than an interim tactic as part of an overall strategy of
fighting an unequal war. To this there
can only be one reasonable response. You break them. The question of what may
replace them becomes irrelevant. Of greater importance is how quickly, to quote
Caspit, can we safely excise the irritant?
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