Echoes

Reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas is bad for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and potentially dangerous for the Jewish state.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
PA President Abbas with Hamas PM Haniyeh 311 (R) (photo credit: REUTERS/Suhaib Salem)
PA President Abbas with Hamas PM Haniyeh 311 (R)
(photo credit: REUTERS/Suhaib Salem)
One need not be blessed with an inordinate amount of sagacity to understand that a reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas is bad for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and potentially dangerous for the Jewish state.
Numerous members of the US Congress, including those responsible for authorizing funding for the Palestinian Authority, have been quick to denounce attempts by Fatah to form a Palestinian national unity government with Hamas as long as Hamas continues to adhere to a path of violent terrorism and reject Israel’s right to exist.
Reps. Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Nita Lowey (D-New York), the chairwoman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, for instance. sent a letter to the Palestinian leadership expressing their “serious concerns.” “Your current courses of action undermine the purposes and threaten the provision of United States’ assistance and support,” they wrote to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, reminding him that the aid was predicated on the Palestinians pursuing peace with Israel. And a bipartisan group of US lawmakers visiting Israel said last week, after a meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that “the PA has chosen an alliance with violence and extremism over the democratic values that Israel represents.”
Unfortunately, the official White House reaction was disappointingly muddled. White House Chief of Staff William Daley told the American Jewish Committee last Thursday that the Obama administration viewed Hamas as a terrorist organization “which targets civilians.” But he added that “the US supports Palestinian reconciliation, providing it is on the terms that advance the cause of the peace.” Daley did not say how the incorporation of a terrorist organization into the Palestinian government would “advance the cause of peace.”
With still greater disregard for Hamas’s agenda, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, through a spokesman, that he “welcomes efforts being made to promote Palestinian reconciliation and the important contribution of Egypt.”
And the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton chimed in that “we have consistently called for reconciliation and peace under the authority of President Abbas as a way to end the division between the West Bank and Gaza, and we have also consistently underlined the need for security and stability across the region.” No criticism was made of Hamas’s terrorist agenda.
Former US president Jimmy Carter, whose bias against Israel was revealed in the very title of his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, went one step farther, arguing in defiance of all common sense that the rapprochement would actually improve the chances of peace: “If handled creatively and flexibly by the international community, Hamas’s return to unified Palestinian governance can increase the likelihood of a twostate solution and a peaceful outcome.”
DO ANY of these statesmen truly believe that a Palestinian government that includes Hamas could possibly “advance the cause of peace” or a two-state solution? They must know that Hamas’s official charter compares Israeli treatment of Palestinians – particularly women and children – to “Nazism”; declares that “abandoning the jihad with the Zionists is an act of high treason that brings a curse on whoever does so”; and claims the “Zionists’ aspiration for world domination is accurately detailed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
This is the same terrorist organization that advocates suicide bombings against innocent Israeli civilians and continues to launch mortar shells and rockets at residents of southern Israel.
What, then, can possibly be motivating experienced statesmen to look favorably upon a rapprochement that so obviously undermines chances for peace and risks bringing to power a Palestinian leadership that vows to destroy the Jewish state?
On Holocaust Remembrance Day we commemorate the six million who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. We also recall how the world stood by silently while the most evil of regimes set about implementing the Final Solution.
As Netanyahu noted on Sunday at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, “The important question that must be asked today is: Have we learned the lessons of the Holocaust in the world?”
Unfortunately, terribly, the prime minister correctly answered that, “To our great regret, the answer is no.”