Well, the Israeli government finally got what it has strived for all along — an irreparable breakdown of the peace process. That is the goal that Benjamin Netanyahu, along with all the other yahoos in his Cabinet of unrepentant hard-liners, has angled for from the get-go, namely finding an excuse to sabotage the peace talks, while blaming their collapse on the Palestinian Authority (PA).
When, for example, Netanyahu’s absurd demand several months ago that in addition to recognizing Israel the people of Palestine should recognize it as “the homeland of the Jewish people” went nowhere, he then went off on another tangent last week, identifying the new national unity government soon to be formed between Hamas and Fatah as sufficient cause to end the peace talks. The Palestinians, he averred with a straight face and with the hauteur of a schoolmaster, could choose peace with Israel or rapport with Hamas, but not both. What is additionally troubling is that the US appears to be siding with him.
The argument advanced here by the Israeli government, and along with it the US, is that Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist and for the PA to form a unity government with it shows bad faith, tantamount to a contradiction in the letter and spirit of the negotiating process. Really? Consider the hypocrisy inherent in this posture: The Israeli Cabinet today is made up predominantly of hard-liners who do not recognize the right of Palestine to exist and yet the Palestinians were expected to bite the bullet and deal with them. The Palestinians did that and as, I say, they should have.
Why did they, and why should they have? Simple reason. There is no society that is totally homogeneous and there is no country anywhere in the world, including Israel and Palestine, whose people all think in lockstep. A human community is imbued with a diversity of ideological currents and political sensibilities, a stratification of class and different cultural perceptions of objective reality. It is the free flow and interaction of all this that gives a polity its dynamic character. We cannot isolate any group from engagement in the public debate, let alone the political process, because we disagree with their stance on issues, regardless of how eccentric, even reprehensible, that stance may be.
This column is not holding a brief for Hamas. We have been critical of its policies in Gaza as of its position on the peace process, but the group is entitled to hold whatever views it deems necessary in pursuit of the national interest. Come to think of it, this column is not holding a brief for Fatah either, which today dominates the PA, a group that, sadly, has allowed corruption, nepotism and other excesses among its ruling elite to go unchecked for years. Only the ballot box in the end will determine whether one party or another is more responsive to the mass sentiment in Palestine. And surely a major player in the political arena like Hamas, with its large following, cannot be excluded from playing its role in Palestinian politics. Its eventual integration into a unity government is a move that is both pressing and popular, demanded by Palestinians everywhere.
And clearly a unity government will indeed strengthen the Palestinian people’s hand in their struggle for independence. The formation of that government is the business neither of Israel nor of the US. After all, Palestinians have never objected to negotiating with the current prime minister of Israel because his Cabinet is made up of racists, bigots and Palestine- deniers. The unity government is additionally welcome news not only because it will strengthen the Palestinians in their struggle for independence, but in their search for a new strategy. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, hinted at that last week when he met a group of visiting Israeli reporters: He said that he may, should this charade continue, dismantle the PA and hand over responsibility for the 2.5 million people who live in the West Bank to Israel.
Let Abbas then go to the United Nations General Assembly and tell the international community that the PA has failed, not for lack of trying, to reach an accord with Israel. Let that international community, subsequent to that deal with the problem. The state of Palestine remains under occupation and Israel, the occupier, continues to violate every international law under the sun, from the Geneva Conventions to the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by military conquest.
Clearly this course of action is being forced on the PA, whose leadership would find it difficult from here on to justify their sustained presence in the West Bank when, 20 years after arriving there to lead their people to statehood, they have nothing to show for it.
So, you argue, after the PA’s departure from that little sliver of historic Palestine we call the West Bank, Israel would be left free to do what it pleases there. But wait, Israel has been doing just that all along. No one, certainly not the PA, has impeded its expansionist ambitions there, nor blocked its other excesses, such as arresting Palestinians, targeting them for assassination, colonizing their land, tormenting them at checkpoints and even whimsically punishing the PA from time to time by withholding taxes due it, as if the PA were a recalcitrant child to be denied his “allowance” as punishment for acts transgression.
It’s too bad that it may come to this, that the PA leadership would find itself having to lift anchor and move on. Its continued presence in the West Bank, I say, would just represent an anomaly.
