Comment: Where is the outrage?

Since Fatah and Hamas announced their “reconciliation” accord last Wednesday, I have waited for the chorus of international outrage.

I waited for the global condemnation of the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, for choosing to tie their fate to an organization ideologically bent on wiping out the Jewish state. Sixty-four years after the family of nations – six million times too late – had finally internalized the imperative to revive the Jews’ sovereignty in their historic land, I waited for those nations to rise up in concerted fury at this overt new legitimization of an armed movement seeking again to dispossess us.

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I waited to hear ridicule heaped upon Abbas’s farcical defense of the new arrangement. The idea that he would continue to negotiate with Israel for shared control of this disputed territory while Hamas would sit silently by – Hamas, whose entire raison d’etre is to eliminate Israel – was self-evidently preposterous.

And then Hamas rendered it still more so, by making explicit that it has no intention of sitting silently by, but is, rather, openly demanding that Abbas withdraw the PLO’s recognition of Israel, whose very presence, in the words of Hamas’s Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, “is illegitimate.”

I waited for at least the responsible member-states of the UN to tear apart the risible assertion that, after bonding with the thugs who seized control of Gaza four years ago by killing hundreds of their own people, the Palestinians now have a unified leadership capable of governing a new Palestine in accordance with sovereign norms. A unified leadership seeking statehood it may claim to be, but it incorporates one element whose stated goal is the replacement of the sovereign state next door.

But I waited in vain. Dumb, delusional or just plain old anti- Semitic, much of the international community is ignoring the Hamas charter’s guiding instruction to “kill the Jews.” In professing that Hamas can somehow metamorphose into an Israel-tolerating entity, it is discounting Hamas leaders’ own relentless insistence that their own sense of religious imperative means they can never, and will never, recognize Israel. It is, in part at least, blaming the Israeli government of the past two years for ostensibly leaving Abbas no choice but to bring in Hamas, as though the failure to reach viable peace terms, whoever is to blame, legitimizes his resort to an alliance with the Islamist killers. And it is insistently brushing aside Hamas’s bloodily proven record of abusing every constructive opportunity in defiant pursuit of its inhumane agenda – first exploiting Israeli withdrawals from West Bank cities to build an army of suicide bombers and then seizing control of Jew-free Gaza to fashion a terror base from which to attack Israel.

Hamas, the White House Chief of Staff William Daley noted on Thursday, “is a terrorist organization which targets civilians.” Indeed it is. And therefore a moral international community would seek to deprive it of any legitimacy, to do everything possible to prevent it growing stronger, and to make plain that it has no place in international dealings. Instead, Daley, in those same remarks, declared that “the United States supports Palestinian reconciliation provided it is on the terms that advance the cause of the peace.”

What kind of doublespeak is that, and from the ostensible moral leader of the free world? How can Fatah-Hamas reconciliation possibly “advance the cause of peace” when one of its components makes plain at every opportunity that it pursues the very opposite goal?

The consequences of past misjudgments, delusions, willful blindnesses, appeasements and lapsed morality are being highlighted this very week, as we remember the Holocaust victims who went to their deaths because the international community failed to act with sufficient alacrity to protect them. Hamas in 2011 cannot yet muster the weaponry to achieve its murderous goal for the Jewish state. But it is funded, trained and armed by a country, Iran, that is developing the means to try to wipe us out. And its partnership with the purportedly moderate face of the Palestinian leadership constitutes an earthshaking potential step forward for its ambitions.

Mahmoud Abbas has welcomed into his internationally lauded leadership an organization for which there should be no international tolerance. If it is formalized, all components of this framework for Palestinian governance – this alliance that encompasses what Abbas himself, after the Gaza coup, called “the forces of darkness” – should be placed outside the framework of the family of nations.

Israel seeks viable terms for separation from the Palestinians, terms under which the Palestinians can achieve their independence without threatening ours.

Abbas is about to turn his back on this avenue. And the international community, rather than indulging him, should be insisting that he think again.

Key global players have chosen disingenuousness in the face of Abbas’s capitulative embrace of the Islamic extremists. What is required is moral denunciation and the unmistakable message that this coalition will not be tolerated.

The man whom Binyamin Netanyahu, just eight months ago, called his “partner in peace” is supposed to formally sign on to this grotesque amalgamation on Wednesday. I have waited for the global condemnation. It is not too late.