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Jewish World Review Feb. 27, 2009 / 3 Adar 5769 Entrapping Netanyahu By Caroline B. Glick
On Thursday US President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell
arrived in Israel for his second visit. Whereas Mitchell's last visit -
which took place in the last days of the electoral campaign -- was touted as
a "listening tour," Mitchell made clear that during his current stay, he
intends to begin calling shots.
His first order of business, we are told, is to pressure the outgoing
government to destroy the so-called outpost communities in Judea and Samaria
and expel the hundreds of Israeli families who live in them. To defend this
call for intra-Israeli instability and violence, Mitchell notes that Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert gave his word to former president George W. Bush that
he would destroy these communities.
Lest Israelis believe that Mitchell will drop this demand once Olmert leaves
office, he has made clear that as far as he is concerned, Olmert's pledge
was not his own - but Israel's. In Mitchells' view, it binds Netanyahu no
less than Olmert. So if Olmert leaves office without having sent IDF
soldiers to throw women and children from their homes, Mitchell, Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will feel free to pressure Netanyahu to
take on the task and punish him if he refuses.
If the Obama administration believes that the presence of Jewish communities
in Judea and Samaria is the primary obstacle to peace, then the Hamas regime
in Gaza is the second greatest obstacle to peace. As long as Hamas, a
recognized terror group is in charge, the administration will be
hard-pressed to push Israel to accept a Palestinian state.
To remedy this situation, the Obama administration has opted for a political
fiction. The President and his aides have decided that a Hamas-Fatah
government will moderate Hamas and therefore such a government will not only
be legitimate, it is desirable. Whereas when the first Hamas-Fatah
government formed in March 2007, the Bush administration refused to have
anything to do with it, today the Obama administration is actively backing
its reestablishment.
As the Obama administration apparently sees it, a Hamas-Fatah government
will provide cover for stepped up pressure on Israel to surrender land to
the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria because Israel will no longer be able
to claim that it has no Palestinian partner. A Hamas-Fatah government will
also allow the US to directly support the Palestinians in Gaza by coercing
Israel to transfer full control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas, (which
will be represented by Fatah), and by enabling the US to provide direct aid
to Palestinian Authority agencies in Gaza.
To advance the administration's efforts to legitimize Hamas, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton will begin her first visit to the region at a
conference in Cairo on Monday that seeks to raise some $2.8 billion for
Gaza. She will pledge nearly a third of that amount -- $900 million -- in
the name of US taxpayers.
The administration claims that none of this money, which it plans to funnel
through UNRWA, will go towards funding Hamas. But this contention is
demonstrably false. UNRWA openly collaborates with Hamas. Its workers double
as Hamas combatants. Its refugee camps and schools are used as Hamas
training bases and missile launch sites. Its mosques are used as recruiting
grounds. And as UNRWA's willingness to transfer a letter from Hamas to US
Senator John Kerry during his visit to Gaza last week demonstrated, the UN
agency is also willing to act as Hamas's surrogate.
While it makes sense for Hamas to agree to join a unity government which
will leave it in charge of Gaza and expand its control to Judea and Samaria
as well, on the surface it makes little sense for Fatah to agree to a deal
that would subordinate it to the same forces who brutally removed it from
power in Gaza in 2007. But Fatah has several good reasons to be enthusiastic
about the deal.
First, by joining Hamas, Fatah will be able to get its hands on a
considerable portion of the international aid money expected to pour into
Gaza. Second, by joining Hamas, Fatah neutralizes - at least in the short
term - Hamas's interest in destroying it as a political force in Palestinian
society. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas's term in office as PA Chairman expired
last month. Were elections to be held today, he would lose a bid for
reelection to Hamas's candidate by a wide margin. By joining a Hamas
government, he will probably avoid the need to stand for reelection anytime
soon.
For Israel, a US-supported Hamas-Fatah government is a hellish prospect. The
political support such a government will lend to the terror war against
Israel will be enormous. But beyond that, such a government, supported by
the US will likely cause Israel security nightmares.
As a good will gesture ahead of the opening of unity talks this week in
Cairo, Fatah released the Hamas operatives its US-trained forces arrested.
Due to US pressure, over the past year, Israel allowed those forces to
deploy in Jenin and Hebron, and in recent months they took some significant
actions against Hamas operatives in those areas. Based on this record of
achievement, Clinton and Mitchell have been pressuring Israel to transfer
security control over all the Palestinian cities in Judea and Samaria to
these forces.
But now that Fatah and Hamas are acting in concert, any such transfers of
authority to Fatah will constitute a surrender of control to Hamas. While no
Israeli government could accept such a demand, the Obama administration,
which supports the Hamas-Fatah government, is likely to view Israel's
refusal to continue to cooperate with Fatah as a reason to criticize Israel.
The Obama administration's ability to disregard the will of the Israeli
voters and the prerogatives of the incoming government owes in large part to
the legacy that the outgoing Olmert-Livni-Barak government is leaving
behind. The outgoing government set the conditions for the Obama
administration's policies in three ways. First, by not defeating Hamas in
Operation Cast Lead and then agreeing to negotiate a ceasefire with the
terror group, the government paved the way for Hamas's acceptance by the US
and Europe as a legitimate political force.
Just as its willingness to conduct negotiations with Syria paved the way for
the administration's current courtship of Iran's Arab client state, and its
willingness to accept UN Security Council resolution 1701 which placed
Hizbullah on equal footing with Israel at the end of the Second Lebanon War,
so too, the outgoing government's willingness to negotiate with Hamas has
facilitated the current US and European drive to accept the Iranian proxy as
a legitimate political force in Palestinian society.
Second, since Hamas's electoral victory in January 2006, the outgoing
government accepted the false narrative that the Palestinian people in Gaza,
who freely voted Hamas into power and have supported its regime ever since,
bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This false
distinction between Hamas's supporters and Hamas effectively tied Israel's
hands each time it was compelled to defend itself against Hamas's aggression
against it. After all, if Gazans are all innocent, then Israel's primary
responsibility should be to make sure that they are safe. And since its
counter-terror operations necessarily place them at risk, those operations
are fair game for international condemnation.
Moreover, at the same time that Israel accepted the dishonest distinction
between Hamas and its supporters, it willingly took on responsibility for
the welfare of Gaza residents. As Hamas shelled Sderot and Ashkelon and
surrounding communities, Israel bowed to international pressure to supply
its enemy and its enemy's supporters with food, medicine, fuel, water, and
anything else that Hamas and the West could reasonable or unreasonably claim
fell under the rubric of humanitarian aid. Had Israel not accepted
responsibility for a population that freely chose to be led by a group
dedicated to its annihilation, today Clinton would be hard pressed to
pressure Israel to open its border crossings into Gaza, or to justify giving
$900 million to Gaza.
Finally, through its unlimited support for Fatah, the outgoing government
has made it enormously difficult for the incoming government to explain its
objections to the Obama administration's policies either to the Israeli
people or to the Americans themselves. By supporting Fatah, the
Olmert-Livni-Barak government set up a false distinction between supposed
moderates and supposed extremists. That distinction ignored and so
legitimized Fatah's continued involvement in terrorism, its political war
against Israel and its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist.
If Fatah is legitimate despite is bad behavior and bellicose ideology, then
two things must be true. First, abstaining from terror can no longer be
viewed as a precondition for receiving international legitimacy. And second,
there is no reason not to accept Hamas. Based on the latter conclusion, many
European leaders and Israeli leftists now openly call for conducting
negotiations with Hamas. And based on the former conclusion, the Obama
administration feels comfortable escalating its demands that Israel give
land, security powers and money to Fatah even as it unifies its forces with
Hamas and so expands Hamas's power from Gaza to Judea and Samaria.
Due to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's legacy, when it enters office the
Netanyahu government will lack the vocabulary it needs to abandon Israel's
current self-defeating course with the Palestinians and defend its actions
to the international community in the face of the Obama administration's use
of dishonest terms like "peace processes" and "moderates" and "humanitarian
aid" to constrain Israel's ability to defend itself. To surmount these
challenges, Netanyahu must move immediately to change the terms of debate on
the Palestinian issue.
Despite his great rhetorical gifts, Netanyahu cannot change the terms of
international debate by himself. He needs two seasoned public figures who
understand the nature of these challenges at his side. If Netanyahu appoints
Natan Sharansky Foreign Minister and Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon Defense Minister,
he will have the top level support he needs to overcome his predecessors'
legacy and change the nature of contemporary discourse on the Palestinians
and on Israel's strategic significance to the West in the face of staunch
opposition from Washington.
Like Netanyahu, Sharansky and Ya'alon understand the basic dishonesty of the
current international conversation relating to the Palestinians. Both men
have come out publicly against the false policy paradigms that have guided
both the outgoing government and the US and Europe. Both are capable of
working with Netanyahu to free Israel from the policy trap being set for
him.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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