Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas

Op-Ed Contributor
Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/opinion/14goldberg-1.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Washington  IN the summer of 2006, at a moment when Hezbollah rockets
were falling virtually without pause on northern Israel, Nizar Rayyan,
husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing
executioner, confessed to me one of his frustrations.
We were meeting in a concrete mosque in the Jabalya refugee camp in
northern Gaza. Mr. Rayyan, who was a member of the Hamas ruling elite,
and an important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him
two weeks ago (along with several of his wives and children), arrived
late to our meeting from parts unknown.
He was watchful for assassins even then, and when I asked him to
describe his typical day, he suggested that I might be a spy for
Fatah. Not the Mossad, mind you, not the C.I.A., but Fatah.
What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had
become! Here was a Saudi-educated, anti-Shiite (but nevertheless
Iranian-backed) Hamas theologian accusing a one-time Israeli Army
prison official-turned-reporter of spying for Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, an
organization that had once been the foremost innovator of anti-Israeli
terrorism but was now, in Mr. Rayyan’s view, indefensibly,
unforgivably moderate.
In the Palestinian civil war, Fatah, which today controls much of the
West Bank and is engaged in intermittent negotiations with Israel, had
become Mr. Rayyan’s direst enemy, a party of apostates and quislings.
“First we must deal with the Muslims who speak of a peace process and
then we will deal with you,” he declared.
But we spoke that day mainly about the hadith, the sayings of the
Prophet Muhammad, that specifically concerned Jews and their diverse
and apparently limitless character failings. This sort of
conversation, while illuminating, can become wearying over time, at
least for the Jewish participant, and so I was happy to learn that Mr.
Rayyan had his own sore points.
“Hezbollah is doing very well against Israel, don’t you think?” I
asked. His face darkened, suggesting that he understood the
implication of my question. At the time, Hamas, too, was firing
rockets into Israel, though irregularly and without much effect.
“We support our brothers in the resistance,” he said. But then he
added, “I think each situation is different.”
How so?
“They have advantages that we in Gaza don’t have,” he said. “They have
excellent weapons. Hezbollah moves freely in Lebanon. We are trapped
in the Israeli cage. So I don’t like to hear the sentence, ‘Hezbollah
is the leader of the resistance.’ It’s a very annoying sentence. They
are heroes to us. But we are the ones fighting in Palestine.”
“And they’re Shia,” I said. Mr. Rayyan, who was educated by Wahhabi
clerics in Saudi Arabia, was known in Gaza as a firm defender of Sunni
theology and privilege, and sometimes lectured at the Islamic
University of Gaza on the danger of Shiite “infiltration.”
“Yes! There are many different secret agendas,” he said. “We have to
be aware of this.”
Hamas men across Gaza were of two minds on the subject of Hezbollah:
One night, I met the members of a Hamas rocket team in the town of
Beit Hanoun, on Gaza’s northern border with Israel. The group’s
leader, who went by the name of Abu Obeidah, said that he, too, was
frustrated by Hezbollah’s success against Israel; he even asked if
Hamas’s rocket attacks that summer were featured on television in
America, and seemed to deflate physically when I told him no.
“Everyone, all the media, says that Hezbollah is wonderful,” he
complained. “We stand with our brothers of Hezbollah, of course, but,
really, look at the advantages they have. They get all the rockets
they will ever need from Iran.”
Hamas is not a monolith, and opinions inside the group differ about
many things, including engagement with the Shiites of Hezbollah and
Iran. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi told me shortly
before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004 that it would be
“uncharitable” to find fault with Iran.
“What do the Arab states do for us?” he asked. “Iran is steadfast
against the Jews.”
Today, there is no doubt that Rantisi’s view holds sway inside the
organization, and many in Hamas wish for even closer ties with Tehran,
particularly over the past month as they have absorbed a battering
from Israel. Even those who believe that Iran is secretly trying to
bring Sunni Palestinians to Shiism acknowledge anti-Israel Shiites as
ideals of resistance.
As the Gaza war moves to a cease-fire, a crucial question will
inevitably arise, as it has before: Should Israel (and by extension,
the United States) try to engage Hamas in a substantive and sustained
manner?
It is a fair question, one worth debating, but it is unmoored from
certain political and theological realities. One irresistible reality
grows from Hamas’s complicated, competitive relationship with
Hezbollah. For Hamas, Hezbollah is not only a source of weapons and
instruction, it is a mentor and role model.
Hamas’s desire to best Hezbollah’s achievements is natural, of course,
but, more to the point, it is radicalizing. One of the reasons, among
many, that Hamas felt compelled to break its cease-fire with Israel
last month was to prove its potency to Muslims impressed with
Hezbollah.
Another reality worth considering concerns theology. Hamas and
Hezbollah emerged from very different streams of Islam: Hamas is the
Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood; Hezbollah is an
outright Iranian proxy that takes its inspiration from the radical
Shiite politics of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But the groups share a
common belief that Jews are a cosmological evil, enemies of Islam
since Muhammad sought refuge in Medina.
Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility
toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of
listening, I haven’t heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is
insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a
Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless,
though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of
Hezbollah.
I once asked Abdel Aziz Rantisi where he learned what he called “the
truth” of the Holocaust — that it didn’t happen — and he referred me
to books published by Hezbollah. Hamas and Hezbollah also share the
view that the solution for Palestine lies in Europe. A spokesman for
Hezbollah, Hassan Izzedine, once told me that the Jews who survive the
Muslim “liberation” of Palestine “can go back to Germany, or wherever
they came from.” He went on to argue that the Jews are a “curse to
anyone who lives near them.”
Nizar Rayyan expressed much the same sentiment the night we spoke in
2006. We had been discussing a passage of the Koran that suggests that
God turns a group of impious Jews into apes and pigs. The Hezbollah
leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among others, has deployed this passage in
his speeches. Once, at a rally in Beirut, he said: “We shout in the
face of the killers of prophets and the descendants of the apes and
pigs: We hope we will not see you next year. The shout remains, ‘Death
to Israel!’”
Mr. Rayyan said that, technically, Mr. Nasrallah was mistaken. “Allah
changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he
specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to
reproduce,” Mr. Rayyan said. “So it is not literally true that Jews
today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of
the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is
true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in
many different ways. They are a cursed people.”
I asked him the question I always ask of Hamas leaders: Could you
agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt
slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and
again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious
candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Mr. Rayyan answered the
question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire
would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of
Islam to eradicate Israel.
There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be
bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is
true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks
cannot defeat deeply felt belief.
The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation.
Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.
The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed
before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United
States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare
the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza,
vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as
an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar
Rayyan.
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"mai in congiunzione col membro maschile" (Luca Logi / rodewalder)
cfr 
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2008/12/luca-logi-e-i-piselli.html

CDO