P. David Hornik
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 22, 2006
The Jewish Left is failing the Hamas test. Seemingly, the election of the fanatically-religious Hamas would have enabled the Jewish Left to join most other Jews in solidarity behind Israel as a country facing a threat. The Left tends to view religion as irrational and destructive, and secularism as rational. During the early period of Oslo terrorism ca. 1993-1996, the Jewish Left constantly assured us that the terror came from fundamentalist “enemies of peace”—Hamas and Islamic Jihad—whereas the ostensibly-secular Arafat and his PLO remained committed to conciliation.
But the empowerment of Hamas—now promoting suicide terrorism for children on its children’s website—has caused no change in the Jewish Left’s mindset. True, for Israeli leftist author Amos Oz, who has steadily vilified “fundamentalist” Jewish settlers, it is still not Hamas itself that is yearning to make peace with Israel.
But in an op-ed called “Someone to Talk To” on the ynet news site, Oz complains that both “Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu . . . claim there is no one to talk with on the Palestinian side” and want to take unilateral measures. Instead, Oz suggests that Israel “try to strengthen the moderate elements amongst the Palestinians, the ones concentrated around [President Abbas’s] office, to negotiate with them and to sign agreements with them. . . . Were negotiations with the presidential establishment to produce even a draft agreement, it could signify a breakthrough for a ‘bypass road’ to avoid Hamas and could lead to victory for the moderate Palestinian camp.”
Apart from the fact that Oz predictably upholds Abbas’s wholly undeserved reputation for moderacy—not to mention efficacy, even after over a year of rule in which Abbas never lifted a finger against the Palestinian terror organizations—this may also be the first time anyone has suggested simply “bypassing” a serving totalitarian government and “negotiating agreements” with selected elements in the regime.
And should that fail to work, “Israel,” Oz assures us, “has got one other way to bypass Hamas: to negotiate with Arab governments for a general resolution to all elements of the conflict on the basis of the 2003 Arab League proposal (the so-called ‘Saudi Proposal’).” In other words, skip over the PA regime altogether and do it all in one shot—with the whole Arab world, with its great fondness for Israel. For Oz, it is better to engage publicly in ludicrous mental contortions than to join the rest of us folks who just think we’re going to have to fight Hamas.
The editorial board of Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz, though, accepts the fact that “the Palestinians elected the parliament and government that Hamas will apparently rule,” and criticizes Labor prime-ministerial candidate Amir Peretz for, like Oz, “want[ing] to establish a moderate track for negotiations with the Palestinians and strengthen pragmatists, while intentionally ignoring the fact that Hamas is in power.”
Does this mean Haaretz has, for the time being, despaired of its dreams of turning Israel and its environs into a southern version of the EU—peaceful, nonchalant, and more or less productive? Not at all: “it is with these elected [Hamas] bodies that Israel must hope to reach an agreement. . . . while Israel’s intelligence services think there is a slim chance for political negotiations with Hamas[,] we must remember that the same intelligence was mistaken in its assessment of Hamas’ political power, and it’s possible that it is mistaken in its assessment of the changes that will take place.”
In other words, for Haaretz the partner for peace is—Hamas itself.
As for the American Jewish Left, the emergence of House and Senate bills calling for an end to aid and ties with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority has prompted objections. The notion that anyone, anytime, might act assertively toward the Palestinians, hold them accountable for their actions, and redirect aid to someone more deserving proves too much for the devotees of the peace ideology.
Seymour Reich, for example, of the Israel Policy Forum insists in a Jerusalem Post op-ed that “US policy—and any Congressional legislation—should . . . provide opportunities and inducements to Palestinians to publicly commit to achieving a two-state solution using nonviolent means and accepting the State of Israel, and allow for engaging with those Palestinians who make such a commitment.” Read: sustain the dream of bribing the Palestinians to adopt Western values after, seemingly, it had been painfully discredited.
At the same time, Reich pontificates, the US must “make certain [its] funds are not used to advance the goals or methods of Hamas.” Read: micromanage a distant, corrupt, anarchic, Third World society to ensure that funds end up, and stay in, the hands of alleged good guys and in no way abet the aims of a terrorist government and a general population of people inundated with anti-Semitic propaganda since earliest childhood.
For the Jewish Left both in Israel and abroad, dreams die hard. But so do the Israeli victims of Palestinian terror that is enabled by those who lack the courage to look at reality and substitute fantasies of friendship with those who loathe them.
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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
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