Yes. People forget that Hamas, like Hezbollah, have assiduously built up political capital by functioning as a welfare state. They, in practice, were doing much more for the people than the Palestinian Authority.
Whatever mixture of motives, from an expression of Islamic charity to cynical manipulation, they were genuinely popular in a way the corrupt Arafat lot haven’t been for decades.
We can’t go around bleating about bringing democracy to the Middle East and then destroy any freely elected govt we don’t like. Makes us look like hypocrites.
To quote Churchill ‘jaw-jaw is always preferable to war-war.’
But then there is on the other side this complete unreality.
I have had this argument a dozen times with a Palestinian friend. I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow but the Palestinians have lost. They are history’s losers. It’s unfair but that is just the way it is. Israel is going nowhere. It is an historical fact and it has a right to exist within secure borders unthreatened by missiles and bombers. You are never going to get a right of return. Your only option is to strike the best deal you can. And ‘best deal’ is going to get crappier with each passing year.
It just seems to me that the last thing Israel and the West should do is play into the hands of extremists and that is what we did by refusing to engage in a dialogue. Like we refuse to engage with the Saudi plan whenever it is bought back to life.
You know, if the Jews can say “Next year in Jerusalem” for 2,000 years before making it stick, why can’t the Palestinians? I actually think that the Israeli position has been eroding for some time, and the Hamas takeover in Gaza is just one more incremental step toward the end of Israel as we know it. The Palestinians must be sensing the same.
And I’m betting the West Bank is going to go the same way, though it’ll be a bit messier. Fatah’s credibility is gone, and the futile attempts of Israel and America to prop it up will only end up undermining it further.
I actually think the Palestinians’ chance of getting a “deal” is much better with Hamas – Israel is more scared of them than it is of the largely impotent Fatah. Hamas is better armed, better disciplined, more reckless, and has better support among the people. It also has some friends with teeth.
The way you say this it sounds like you view Hamas as some sort of alien entity manipulating the poor Palestinian people, as opposed to people who are actually working to build a working civil infrastructure for their people. I mean they could be building schools and hospitals in their communities because they would like to have schools and hospitals in their communities right?
sal ammoniac The Palestinians are not ‘a people’ in the way the Israelis were. They didn’t have a historical bond in the same way. The Palestinians really are a conglomeration of the people who got shafted by Transjordan, Syria and Egypt. If they were a people like the Israelis then you’d see a lot more legitimate help coming from Jordan, Egypt and Syria, rather than using them as a buffer people against their enemy. They were essentially abandoned by ‘their people’, when the partitions occurred. The Jews are a bit of a singularity in their ability to maintain social cohesion across vast physical and temporal distances. I seriously doubt the Palestinians will ever have that sort of cohesion. More likely the Palestinian people will fall into the dustbin of history as another tribe that was destroyed/assimilated into a wider culture. I know a Palestinian guy here in New York who is convinced that emulating the Israelis is the key to Palestinian success, I’d be interested in seeing how much traction he gets with that idea.
Not to go too far down this road, because it’s a bit of a hijack, but I think this is nonsense. I think the Palestinians are vastly more coherent as a people than the Jews are.
I don’t think history supports that notion. When Jews were having problems in Ethiopia, Israel airlifted them to Israel. When Palestinians were having problems in Jordan, the military opened fire upon them. The Palestinians are part of the same tribal system as the Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, but there was not really any attempt to assimilate them into those countries when Israel was formed. Israel on the other hand assimilated jews from all over the planet.
You think current events are good news for Palestinians?
I beg to differ.
I’ll echo what was said by someone’s Palestinian friend - the best chance for Palestinian statehood, is in emulating the successful example set by Israel itself.
Before Israel was a state, it was divided into a more radical and militant faction (the Irgun and allies) and a more moderate faction. The two came into conflict, and the more moderate faction suppressed the more militant one. I suggest that the victory of the moderate nationalists over the “reckless” ones “with teeth” was vital to their success. Conversely, the exact reverse situation is going to lead to nothing but failure.
This might have been inevitable. The Palestinians who were alive in 1948 when the current mess started are dying off, leaving fewer people who have actual memories of pre-Israel existence. Maybe a schism is forming between Palestinians who are reconciled to Israel’s existence and those who’ll never accept it and the former group sees a chance for relative prosperity and peace if they give up on a dream that for most of them died with their ancestors. I bet in five years the West Bank will be relatively stable and Gaza will become more extreme, with devout Israel-haters moving in and moderates getting the heck out. The West Bank might have a chance (albeit as an impoverished, semi-stable microstate eking by as Israel’s labour force), while Gaza will remain a shithole for quite some time to come.
It’s not pretty, but I do believe in democracy, even if it results in unpleasant results. More importantly, in this particular case, a signal was needed to demonstrate just what public opinion was. And it obviously isn’t pretty.
While no one knew exactly what was going to happen, this has actually clarified the situation. We know now that no compromise is going to happen for the foreseeable future; Arafat (hence Fatah) wouldn’t do it, and Hamas certainly won’t. The people’s real desires have been made obvious to everyone. They don’t want a compromise. So we can cut off the money fueling murder and terror without looking like monsters.
So Israel is going to build a wall to keep the suicide bombers out, and will most likely overrun Gaza once Hamas starts attacking from there. The Palestinians lose. But they’ve made their own bed and will have to lie in it.
Well, Israel is the public outrage bandied about at every level in every speech, but I’d like to think Achmed Average just wants a private life and is likelier to support (as opposed to just showing up at scripted mass rallies and chanting and other useless activities) a government that may be crooked but isn’t randomly violent. The West bank has a small chance if they can foist their nuttier denizens off on Gaza. I hope they don’t blow it.
Well, yes and no. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Hamas won somewhat more than half the parliamentary seats while taking somewhat less than half of the popular vote. Primarily because of this…
The Palestinian election system is a bit weird. Half the members are elected proprtionally based on voting for slates. Half are elected by district. Hamas took the single largest block of the proportional vote ( just slightly ahead of Fatah ), but less than that of the total combined secular parties. Where they surged to power was in the district voting, where strict party discipline meant they were often running a single Hamas candidate against two different Fatah candidates, plus assorted other secularist candidates. So the secularists frequently split their votes, while the Hamas slate was unified.
Not that the election didn’t represent a sea-change. It may well have - certainly it was very significant indeed whether it was the result of anger at Fatah corruption or a greater social shift towards militant Islamism ( or both ).
But the lesson to take home, IMHO, is that Palestinian society is even more deeply divided than ever before, rather than more unified.
You might see all that as the bright side :rolleyes: , but still, what makes you think setting off a civil war among Palestinians was “half the point of pushing for elections”? I don’t recall anyone saying or even implying that at the time.
You’ve got that backwards. The Israelis – as distinct from the Jews – are “a people” now. In 1948 they were not. The Palestinians, OTOH, had no national identity in 1948 – but they do now; their circumstances and experience have brought it into being.
