What to do about Hamas, Thursday, October 20, 2005

President Bush will demand Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fight terror and will ignore Abbas’ complaints about Israeli settlement expansion. No, Bush will speak out against settlement expansion and give Abbas a warm hug. No, he’ll tell Abbas to pass a law forcing anyone to run in the PLC elections give up violence, so Hamas can run. No, he’ll tell Abbas there can’t be elections if Hamas runs.

As usual under such circumstances – an Arab leader with whom Israel is supposed to be in dialogue is going to meet the president of the U.S. – the reports in the Israeli press impatiently predict what will happen based on the wishful thinking of the writer or their sources, trying to prove to the Israeli reader there is nothing to worry about or there is everything to worry about.

But the reality on the ground nowadays in the territories Israel captured in 1967 – and for that matter inside Israel itself – is too complicated for the mono-dimensional approaches taken, for example, by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who forthrightly states Israel should do whatever it can to foil the Palestinian elections if Hamas is allowed to run. As far as Shalom sees it, Hamas will win the Palestinian elections, and that is an existential threat to the PA, if not Israel. No nuance there. He brushes of examples of history – the Hamas could be banned from running, but appear under a different name for example, like the Islamic Party of Palestine, or some such cover. Sinn Fein ran, while the IRA was banned – and it took a decade for the IRA to disarm, not the three months Israel is demanding of the PA to disarm the Hamas.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that these kinds of Israeli obstacles are part of a larger conspiracy led by Ariel Sharon to prevent any further progress. And that the army’s crackdown in the territories – though they announced today they were not going to formalize the separate roads for Arabs and Jews, as had been promised earlier this week as ‘retaliation’ for the slaying of three settler youths by a drive-by Palestinian killers – is meant to make sure there is no real political process as they arrest candidates for the PLC.

But it is no conspiracy that guides Israeli policies, unless one considers the myopia that sees the Palestinian issue as purely a matter of security and not politics as a conspiracy. But when it is combined with a time-proven method of avoiding dealing directly with the issue, it is easy to see why the political poles in Israel, on the Left and Right, prefer to accuse Sharon of mono-dimensionality, and refuse to acknowledge that the Center is now the dominant political arena, and there, the Sharon method is understood to be complex, even if it sometimes appears quite simple, like getting up and moving out of Gaza, lock, stock and barrel. Thus, for every article in the press or statement by the foreign minister threatening to disrupt the PLC elections if Hamas takes part, there is an article saying Israel should not do anything that could be interpreted as interfering in the Palestinian elections.

Abbas is also in a complicated situation, but he does not have the luxury of being in full control of the PA’s armed forces, or for that matter the PA’s governmental administration. It’s said that he issues the proper commands about rounding up suspects, but that by the time the order reaches the field level, the troops are not ready to put their lives on the line. He’s popular, but the self-discipline required of any state’s armed forces was never imbued into the forces organized by Yasser Arafat in his day, a structure that Abbas has been trying to dismantle and reform, without much obvious success.

It’s not clear that George Bush will be able to see the grays between demanding the white and black of reiterating his promise there will be a Palestinian state, and fighting terror as the way to get there. But Condoleezza Rice understands the nuances. That’s why she slammed Israeli draft plans for a new Jewish neighborhood next to Maale Adumim, in the area known as E1, knowing that if Israeli control extends to that relatively small area it would effectively cut the West Bank in half between north and south for the Palestinians, making a viable Palestinian state a fantasy, not a tangible plank in Bush’s platform as he has been presenting it so far.

So, some might say why trust Bush – or even care about what he says. He’s already a lame duck, what with the Iraqi debacle, the hurricane debacles, the failure to change social security, and a host of other failures for which he is being blamed, with his approval ratings below 40 percent. How much power does he really wield, might be asked in some circles. Can he get Congress, for example, to allocate the money he will undoubtedly promise University of Texas alumnus, PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, who might be the next prime minister if Ahmed Qurei’ goes through with a resignation forced by a PLC vote demanding a more effective anti-anarchy security force for the PA.

Israelis, of course, would prefer not to have to worry about all this. The holiday season is still in full swing and although the first rains of winter struck over the last 24 hours, drenching sukkot, the simple thatched huts built by religious Jews to commemorate the huts of the Israelites gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai awaiting Moses’ delivery of Torah. Next week, the holiday marking the deliverance of the Torah, Simhat Torah, will be marked in mid-week, giving secular Israelis, the majority in the country by far, another reason for making a long weekend from the mid-week day off.

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