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COMMENTARY
June 21, 2003
Hamas
An organization that blows up buses pizzerias discos bingo parlours -- all of them with people inside -- might be considered part of the problem or part of the solution depending upon one's point of view. Americans incline to the former Europeans to the latter view when considering the role of Hamas in the "peace process" between Israel and Palestine. Hamas like the Mafia can honestly claim that it is a charitable society as well as a terrorist network. It raises and spends money as opaquely as it does on bombs to subsidize schooling for orphan children and supplement the widow's mite. It stages public "cultural" events even if its sentries violently discourage Western media from filming them. Its very collection of protection money could be interpreted as a form of taxation and its execution of uncooperative Palestinians as a kind of law enforcement. The head of the organization is a religious man. What's not to like about Hamas? Good question according to fashionable opinion in "old Europe" and among many "new Europeans" besides. For here is an organization which shares their own chic disapproval of anything American or Israeli. There may be reservations about the means but the ends are held in common. While it is seldom easy to extract fine positions from the blather of diplomacy it becomes increasingly apparent that among the four members of the "Quartet" co-sponsoring the "road map to peace" -- the U.S. the E.U. the U.N. and Russia -- there is no agreement on how to proceed. The U.N. and Russia have already reduced themselves to the position of spectators and the rest of the E.U. can see no way to win which gets us down to the usual two drivers: the Americans in the front and the French in the back seat. Differences are papered over not so much with words but in their absence. For instance the official "road map" document published April 30th is "performance-based" and provides "clear phases timelines target dates and benchmarks" or so it says. There are 25 such "benchmarks" in "Phase I" which according to the schedule should be over already. I couldn't find one that had been indisputably achieved though several are still being worked on. More fundamentally there are no objective criteria by which even the simplest requirements could be deemed to have been met by all parties. It's just a long list of judgement calls. Even the definition of what constitutes an "unequivocal statement" is open to interpretation. What if for instance the Palestinian leadership whose very definition before "free elections" under a "new constitution" is anyway unclear say one thing in English and another in Arabic? Both statements sound unequivocal but one contradicts the other. This might be a manageable problem if interested parties within the Quartet were singing the same hymn but they're not. Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell have made clear that as far as the U.S. is concerned Yasser Arafat is beyond the pale and that only Mahmoud Abbas the recently installed Palestinian prime minister belongs in polite society. The Europeans evidently disagree as the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin recently went out of his way to visit Arafat in what's left of his Ramallah compound and caress him as the true Palestinian leader. With Arafat it is possible to embrace a position which though it partakes of Cloud Cuckooland nevertheless yields a logical consistency. One may for sake of argument take the man at his word that he is not the godfather of Palestinian terrorism and is instead the embodiment of his people's peaceful aspiration to statehood and thus respectfully disagree with the assessment of the U.S. President. One cannot however do this with Hamas. It does not even claim to have peaceful intentions. And it's at this point that even the Cloud Cuckoo logic frays. The French speaking characteristically if by self-appointment for Europe hold that Hamas is also among the legitimate parties expressing Palestinian aspirations. Rather than disarming them we should negotiate and consider their demands. (Which as they are eager to repeat are the total annihilation of Israel and Israelis.) Enter Colin Powell yesterday into Israeli airspace. He said unequivocally in Ariel Sharon's presence that Hamas must be disarmed. He then inferred this in Mr. Abbas's presence in Jericho. He then listened politely as Mr. Abbas ignored the inference and yammered about how Israel's "confrontation logic does not coincide with the logic of peace" -- whatever that meant. Forgetting for a moment who is going to do the disarming of Hamas (no one on the scene has the power except Israel) the thing itself is at issue. Not because of a disagreement between Israel and the Palestinians but because of a disagreement between the U.S. and France. The Palestinians can hardly be expected to take the U.S. position when the French are offering to let them off the hook. Thanks chiefly to France it must continue to be at issue so long as the Quartet is theoretically involved. But since it is not practically necessary -- or even desirable -- to have anyone speaking for fashionable opinion in Europe I should expect the charade to soon end. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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