FATAH, HAMAS HAMMER OUT RECONCILIATION DEAL
Jpost.Com Staff & Reuters
Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2011
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and its rival Hamas said on Wednesday they had resolved their deep divisions, opening the way for a unity government and national elections. The deal, which took many officials by surprise, was thrashed out in Egypt and followed a series of secret meetings.… The accord was first reported by Egypt’s intelligence service, which brokered the talks.…
Spokespeople for both Hamas and Fatah confirmed that “all differences” have been worked out between the long-feuding Palestinian political movements.…
SPRINGTIME FOR HAMAS & FATAH: WINTER FOR ISRAEL & U.S.
Susan L. M. Goldberg
NewsRealBlog, April 28, 2011
It’s the Arab Spring and love is in the air. After a torrid on-and-off affair, rival terrorist political factions Hamas and Fatah are on again. According to mutual best-friend Egypt, things are red-hot.
On Wednesday, Hamas and Fatah engaged in forming an interim government while promising to decide on a date for general elections. According to Egyptian intelligence, “The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions,” including the color for the bridal party: blood red.
A traditional reception will follow the political nuptials, the highlight of which will be the “beginning anew of the Palestinian struggle,” hosted by Deputy Hamas politburo chief Abu Marzouk.
While details of the guest list have yet to be announced, Fatah Central Committee Member Azzam Ahmad declared that “non-partisan elements that will represent the Palestinian people” will be encouraged to attend. However, analysts speculate that one name will be notably absent from the list: Gilad Shalit, the Israeli Army soldier currently being held captive by Hamas for 1,767 days and counting.
Not surprisingly, the recently liberated Egyptian government played a strategic role in reuniting the former [allies]. Bored with their decades-old union with the Jewish state, the newer, fresher Egypt is seeking to re-brand its image; according to 54% of Egyptians, this means de-friending Israel.
Scoring mutual “Likes” in the process, the interim Egyptian military government and Hamas dictatorship used the opportunity to do a little bonding of their own; relationship-building that was initiated with the release of “scores” of Palestinian prisoners from Egyptian jails over the past few weeks. It is expected that Egypt will play best man to Hamas in the upcoming union. Planned pre-wedding activities include the re-opening of the Rafah border crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip, [as well as] a rumoured bachelor party promise: The establishment of Hamas’s “unofficial embassy” in Cairo.…
Speaking on behalf of Israel (the scorned woman in the scenario) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a desperate plea for mediation, lest her already shaky union with Fatah truly comes to an end. “It’s either us, or Hamas; you can’t have us both!” the prime minister declared.…
[However], prospects for reconciliation between [Israel and Fatah] look dim. For example, Fatah has already declared a desire to dump the couple’s mediator: “An aide to Mr. Abbas stated recently he would sacrifice U.S. financial assistance if this was the price of unity.…” Israel, it would seem, is fooling herself if she thinks her mediator will step in to save the day.
According to…[journalist] Zvi Bar’el, “Even the United States will not be able to object to a united Palestinian government, in which Hamas is a partner. After all, it had agreed to accept and even support, economically and militarily, a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah was partner. Nor will the United States and Europe be able to object to general elections in the territories, or deny their results, when the West is demanding Arab leaders implement democratic reforms.” In short, “Israel could find itself isolated yet again if it objects to the reconciliation or the election.”
Could a Hamas-Fatah union reveal the true nature of [both movements] for the world to see? If so, would that make a difference to the 100 nations now on [their] side? Or will the international community continue to turn a blind eye to what has become the obvious truth in the melodrama: The violent, [newly-minted] partner[s] want [their] victim dead, for good.…
[O]nly one adage can offer any reassurance: “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.”
FATAH-HAMAS AGREEMENT:
ANOTHER NAIL IN THE “PEACE PROCESS’S” COFFIN
Barry RubinPajamas Media, April 27, 2011
Suddenly, after years of persistent failure, Fatah and Hamas—which means the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas—have signed a detailed reconciliation agreement. Why now?
It’s preparation for the [upcoming] UN [General Assembly, where the PA will undoubtedly] claim that it is sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinians. [This will greatly increase the probability that the UN will vote in September] to unilaterally create a Palestinian State.…
[And] why is Hamas going along with this? Because the deal gives it a lot, including the promise of elections in a year. Hamas won the last elections and presumably is confident—especially as it looks at electoral successes for Hezbollah in Lebanon and probably soon for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—that it will win again.
But there’s also another reason. Hamas is probably quite happy with the idea that many countries—and perhaps the UN—will recognize an independent Palestinian state unconditionally. In other words, there will be a widely, or internationally, accepted Palestine without the need to make peace with Israel. No concessions need be made. The Palestinians will get everything and give up nothing. They will not be bound in any way by border changes or security guarantees. The struggle to wipe Israel off the map can continue.
It’s Hamas’s dream come true.
Anyone who thinks this helps the peace process is deluded. Hamas will never accept any peace agreement with Israel and will radicalize Fatah’s negotiating position out of competition between the two rivals to prove their militancy. The race to commit the most bloody terrorist acts w[ill] intensify.
Make no mistake. Whether or not this development has any direct effect on the ground, it’s another step toward the death of any real Israel-Palestinian peace process.
(Barry Rubin will be speaking at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research’s upcoming Gala, scheduled for June 15, 2011.)
PALESTINIANS LAUNCH THEIR REVOLUTION
Jackson Diehl
Washington Post, April 27, 2011
It’s not yet certain that a political deal announced Wednesday by the long-divided Palestinian Fatah and Hamas factions will stick—similar pacts have been proclaimed and then discarded several times in the last four years.
But one thing is sure: If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas moves forward with the reconciliation with the Islamic Hamas movement, it will mean he has written off the Obama administration and the peace process it has tried to broker, once and for all.
Negotiations between Abbas and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu have been dormant since last fall—as has the administration’s diplomacy (When was the last time George Mitchell was seen in public?) But lately the administration has seemed to be preparing for another push. At a conference in Washington this month Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised “a renewed pursuit of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace by the administration” and said Obama would make a major speech on the subject. Obama himself told Jewish leaders at a White House meeting in March that he believed Abbas was ready to make peace with Israel. But now it seems the Palestinian leader was headed in another direction entirely.…
For Israel and the Obama administration, the reconciliation spells a disaster. According to reports Wednesday, it probably will mean the end of the West Bank administration headed by Salaam Fayyad, a technocrat highly respected by both Americans and Israelis. If so, Congress will almost certainly suspend $400 million in annual U.S. aid. It could mean the reorganization of Fatah’s U.S.-trained security forces, which have worked with Israel to keep the peace in the West Bank for the last several years, and their eventual integration with the cadres of the Iranian-backed Hamas.
The deal will also end any serious prospect of peace talks—since Hamas is most unlikely to accept longstanding Western demands that it accept Israel, renounce violence and abide by past Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In recent weeks Hamas’ fighters have returned to firing mortars and missiles from Gaza at Israeli cities—including one missile that was aimed at a yellow Israeli school bus.
Netanyahu has been working on a new peace initiative that he planned to unveil before the U.S. Congress next month, and that could have involved withdrawals of Israeli troops from parts of the West Bank. [However], the Palestinian [unity] deal will [undoubtedly force Netanyahu to] “slam on the brakes,” an Israeli official told me. “Any effort to move forward [on this front] would be completely stopped.”
Abbas apparently doesn’t mind. For some time he has been working on a different initiative: a plan to seek an endorsement of Palestinian statehood by the UN General Assembly at its meeting in September. The Obama administration has publicly opposed the idea, and Netanyahu has warned that Israel might respond with unilateral steps of its own.
But Abbas seems deeply disillusioned with Obama. He recently trashed the U.S. president in an interview with Newsweek, saying he had mismanaged the issue of Israeli settlements. And the Palestinian leader wrote Netanyahu off as soon as he took office two years ago.…
The Palestinian announcement took the Israelis by surprise; likely the Obama administration was also blindsided.… [Accordingly], the Obama administration will have to scramble to adjust to a radically new situation in yet another Middle Eastern land.
ISRAEL’S FOLLY
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield Blog, April 26, 2011
The State of Israel spent the first 30 years of its modern existence reclaiming its territory, and the next 33 years negotiating the terms on which it would be returned to the neighboring countries which had made war on it, as well as an entirely new terrorist state created in the name of peace and maintained in the name of war.
Thirty-three years after the country’s first “hawkish” conservative PM allowed himself to be browbeaten by Jimmy Carter into turning over territory three times its own present size to an Egypt whose new leaders are now disavowing the accords—its current “hawkish” conservative PM is readying himself to offer a whole new raft of concessions in the hopes of preempting a unilateral solution by [U.S. president] Obama or [Palestinian Authority president] Abbas.
For all the furious New York Times articles, there is little to distinguish Israel’s hawks from its doves once they take up their residence in Beit Aghion on the corner of Lord Balfour’s street. Like their American counterparts, they rapidly trade in the rhetoric about an “Undivided Jerusalem” and “War on Terror” for the burden of realpolitik built on a copy of the Art of Appeasement.
The governing mandate of every Israeli PM since 1992 (and perhaps even earlier) has been to try and make a deal with the Palestinian Arabs work. The folly of this has been amply demonstrated time and time again, filling Israel’s cemeteries and hospitals, destroying its security and international standing, and dividing its people against themselves. And yet all these factors have only spurred on the perception that the deal must be somehow made to work. Somehow.
The doves have tried multilateral negotiations. The hawks tried unilateral concessions. The sum total of their efforts is the creation of two terrorist states, one recognized by the international community…and both at war with Israel inside its own borders.
The first state is run by the KGB trained funder of the Munich Massacre and backed by the international community. The second state is run by the local affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and funded by the Muslim world. These two states, popularly known as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas run Gaza, differ only in their tactics, not their aims.…
Almost two decades of negotiations have led to nothing but eighteen years of terror. A state of affairs ignored by everyone except the people living on the firing line, their family sedans scarred by bullets, their kindergartens equipped with bomb shelters and their children equipped with emergency cell phones to check in after every attack.… Year after year, and leader after leader, the Israeli response has been to push forward in the hopes of finding light at the end of the tunnel. But the tunnel has only gotten darker and narrower. And it is growing obvious to even the dimmest observer that the tunnel of peace is really a dead end. Talk of a “breakthrough” keeps alive the hope that Israel can slim down enough to squeeze through a pinhole that simply doesn’t exist.
Israeli leaders are surrounded by technocrats and diplomats who favor retreating from territory, rather than from bad policies. So the land goes, the people die and the bad policies remain. Though Rabin had remained dubious about the…Oslo Accords, the inevitability of an agreement has been adopted by the entire [Israeli] political establishment. Even the “hawks” spend most of their time moving border lines on a map to find some acceptable formula for a Palestinian state. No one asks anymore whether there should be a Palestinian state. Only how big it should be. And how many Israelis should be evicted from their homes in the name of a lasting peace.
But few Israelis believe in a lasting peace anymore. Instead they expect that some form of negotiated separation will keep their sons at home and away from the firefights in Gaza and the West Bank. Never mind that such a separation is even more of an illusion. Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Sharon’s unilateral pullout from Gaza put Hezbollah and Hamas into power and brought on the Second Lebanon War and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit.…
Even fewer in Israel’s political establishment believe that terrorism will ever end. The obligatory Rabin festivals and video clips have taken on the air of a hippie festival, charmingly idealistic and completely unrealistic.… All it takes to make your own terrorist group is a dozen friends and a Dubai bank account. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are umbrella groups supported by numberless militias, any of whom can form their own terrorist group at any time.…
Israeli leaders search for some magic formula that will either achieve a peace agreement or convince the world that the gangs of suit-decked Palestinian…terrorists are not serious about peace. This futile brand of alchemy, with the goal of turning hate into gold, is futilely perverse.…
The “1967 borders,” [for example], are as legally and demographically random as any other. The “Green Line” is nothing but a convenient talking point. [Even if] all the territory back to the 1967 borders [were transferred to] terrorist hands, their attention would [simply] turn to the territory beyond it. 1967 would give way to 1948. New terrorist attacks would be carried out in the name of claiming even more land for the “refugees”.… And the international community would demand new concessions. And eventually a One State Solution.…
The Israeli flag is the symbol of the House of David, a lad who built a nation by standing up to Goliath. To be worthy of the flag, is to be worthy of the act. Israel survived [the first thirty years of its existence] by standing up to the armies of Islam. Not willingly, but reluctantly, [and only after] all other options had been exhausted. Now, [ however], it faces a political war in which all the diplomatic options will never be exhausted, until its enemies overreach themselves with a full invasion.
And by then, Israel may no longer be capable of defending itself.
