A Pause Not A Ceasefire

[Valin]

Strategy Page:

11/30/12

 

Now that the UN has, for the third time, recognized “Palestine” as a state nothing has really changed. It was mainly theater and posturing. Palestinians have more immediate problems that have little to do with Israel. Many Israelis Palestinians believe that the latest “war” between Hamas and Israel was intended to distract Palestinians from the poor performance of their leaders. Both Hamas and Fatah are facing more popular resistance to their rule. Neither group will allow fair elections. In effect, Fatah and Hamas are self-perpetuating political parties that live off the populations they control. This is the sort of thing that got the Arab Spring uprisings going last year. Fatah and Hamas felt they were immune to that sort of unrest because for decades Palestinians had been bombarded with "Israel must be destroyed before anything else" propaganda. A growing number of Palestinians are questioning these priorities. While most Palestinians still want to destroy Israel and kill lots of Jews, they also feel that their leaders are corrupt and exploitative and holding them back more than the Israelis. Hamas and Fatah are fighting back, arresting and jailing political activists and accusing them of working for Israel. Meanwhile, the Arab states that provide most of the money to keep the Hamas and Fatah bureaucracies going are cutting back. The donor states are fed up with the self-destructive tendencies favored by Palestinians, as well as the corruption that sees so much of the aid money disappear into foreign bank accounts. This cash shortage is making Fatah and Hamas even more unpopular, because one of their most effective ways of maintaining power was to carefully distribute government jobs to those best able to rally popular support (or at least suppress disruptive activity) for the corrupt leadership. More Palestinians are recognizing that their support for terrorism is hurting their economic prospects. But so far there’s not a lot of enthusiasm to change anything, other than ineffective demands that corruption in Hamas and Fatah somehow disappear.

 

The problem with negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is that the Palestinians give two different sets of goals. To the West, and non-Moslems they say that co-existence with Israel is acceptable and all that has to be done is work out is the details. But to Moslems and especially Palestinians both Hamas and Fatah preach total destruction of Israel as the only acceptable goal and anything short of that is just a bargaining tactic. The Palestinians and Arabs in general, have been consistent in this respect. From the moment the UN approved the creation of Israel in 1947, the Arab world has rejected that and vowed to erase Israel no matter what it takes. Many in the West choose to ignore this and pretend that it’s all about Israeli refusal to negotiate.

 

(Snip)