Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: L'invisibile moderazione di Hamas

Lungo, ma vale ogni parola
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2974
Nixed Signals
When Hamas hinted at peace, U.S. media wouldn't take the message
By Seth Ackerman
After the June 25 capture of one of its soldiers in a raid by Hamas
militants, Israel responded with a massive invasion of Gaza. It
destroyed the area's electrical generators, blew up bridges and
launched a barrage of artillery at Palestinian camps and settlements.
Palestinian fighters vowed steadfast resistance. Whatever meager hopes
remained for peace talks, cease-fires or an improvement in the already
dire humanitarian situation in Gaza seemed to have evaporated. Israel
was demanding the unconditional release of the soldier, while leaders
of Hamas-in control of the Palestinian government following the
January 2006 elections-insisted he would be returned only in exchange
for Palestinian prisoners.
For the U.S. news-consuming public, hopes for a durable halt to
Israeli/ Palestinian violence must have seemed even slimmer than the
stand-off over the captured soldier might have led one to believe. For
U.S. news outlets were informing their readers that Hamas was not
merely an armed group holding a hostage as a bargaining chip. It was a
terrorist faction "sworn to Israel's destruction" (Boston Globe,
6/26/06) that "refuses to recognize Israel" (Baltimore Sun,
6/27/06). "Sworn to Israel's destruction," a New York Daily News
editorial explained (6/29/06), "Hamas has made a pariah of the
Palestinian government." "The group, sworn to Israel's
destruction, has refused international calls to renounce violence or
recognize Israel's right to exist," wrote the Associated Press
(6/29/06).
To Americans all too accustomed to watching the intractable Israeli/
Palestinian conflict from afar, a kidnapped soldier might have seemed,
in itself, to be a manageable problem. But as long as Israel was faced
with a Palestinian government in the hands of a group that "refuses
to recognize Israel and wants to fight, not talk," as Philadelphia
Inquirer foreign affairs analyst Trudy Rubin put it (7/7/06), what
option did Israel have besides all-out war? How could Israel negotiate
with a group unalterably committed to its destruction?
"Not a prisoner of dogmas"
Americans had been hearing this message since long before Hamas'
January victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. Established
in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Egypt-based Muslim Brother-
hood movement, Hamas from the very start staked out a position of
uncompromising militancy in the fight against Israel. Adopting a
blatantly anti-Semitic founding charter that cites The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion and explicitly rejects a peaceful solution to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it denounced the 1993 Oslo Accords and
refused to participate in the Palestinian political system established
in the wake of the agreement. Most notoriously, it was known for its
gruesome suicide attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli
civilians, especially after the start of the Second Intifada in late
2000.
Throughout the 1990s, Hamas functioned to a large extent as a hardline
underground Palestinian opposition movement, frequently lashing out
against Israel in order to discredit Yassir Arafat's ruling Fatah
party, which kept a firm and authoritarian grip on Palestinian
politics. On countless occasions, peace moves between Israel and the
Palestinian National Authority were undermined by Hamas violence. These
attacks were motivated not only by a desire to capitalize on public
disillusionment with the Arafat-led peace process, but by anger at
Hamas' political marginalization at the hands of old-guard Fatah
apparatchiks.
Yet analysts also saw the potential for far-reaching change in Hamas'
political outlook. As early as 2000, a study by Israel's leading
academic specialists on Hamas (Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The
Palestinian Hamas) cautioned that the Islamist group, despite its
fanatical image, "is not a prisoner of its own dogmas. It does not
shut itself behind absolute truths, nor does it subordinate its
activities and decisions to the officially held religious doctrine."
After the signing of the Oslo Accords, a Palestinian government was set
up and a growing consensus for a two-state solution solidified within
Palestinian public opinion. Hamas came under increasing popular
pressure, including from some of its own supporters, to shift in a more
pragmatic direction-to join the political process, compete in
elections and reach consensus with the dominant Fatah party, which
favors peace with Israel. But pragmatists within Hamas faced resistance
from the group's more hardline cadres, who fiercely opposed any
departures from the rigid ideology of the movement's founding charter
and who argued that moderation by Hamas would be met with neither
concessions from Israel nor greater openness on the part of Fatah. The
pace of ideological change was glacial.
Yet as Mishal and Sela observed, the group possessed a deft "ability
to justify controversial political conduct in religious terms" and a
"willingness to exist with internal contradiction." The scholars'
conclusion: "We cannot rule out the possibility of a significant
shift in Hamas' relations with Israel to the point that what seems
ideologically heretical in the present might become inevitable in the
future."
"Signs of pragmatism"
As the 2006 Palestinian elections approached, a number of analysts were
asking whether that day had finally arrived. For the first time, Hamas
had decided to compete in a national parliamentary election, which
forced the Islamists to shift their focus away from the struggle
against Israel. After having carried out almost 30 suicide bombings in
Israel during the Second Intifada, the group agreed to a cease-fire and
adhered to it. As of this writing, Hamas has not carried out a suicide
attack inside Israel since August 2004. "Sometimes one has to rub
one's eyes in disbelief when one sees Hamas activists demanding with
all their might that [Palestinians] refrain from violence and maintain
the calm," wrote Danny Rubinstein, who covers Palestinian affairs for
Ha'aretz, the Israeli newspaper (12/12/05). "No Hamas activists
have been involved in terror attacks recently."
More importantly, the group had begun to signal that it was ready to
adjust its political position on the conflict with Israel. "Slowly,
painstakingly, but inexorably, Hamas is moving away from its
traditional notion that Palestine is an Islamic waqf [land-in-trust]
'from the river to the sea,'" observed the Economist's veteran
Palestine correspondent, Graham Usher (Middle East Report Online,
8/21/05). The party had not simply reverted to a strategy of "a
long-term armistice (hudna) that would accept the '1967
Territories' as a Palestinian proto-state until the forces of Islam
are strong enough to recover Palestine 'as a whole.'" Rather,
Usher reported, "Hamas is signaling that it accepts Israel as a
political reality today and is intimating that it would accept a final
agreement with Israel 'according to the parameters of the [1991]
Madrid conference and U.N. resolutions,' says Palestinian analyst
Khaled Hroub, an authority on the Islamist party."
Just before the election, Robert Malley, the former Middle East policy
director in the Clinton National Security Council, organized a report
for the International Crisis Group (Enter Hamas: The Challenges of
Political Integration, ICG, 1/18/06) that reviewed the "signs of
pragmatism" coming from Hamas. Based on dozens of interviews in the
field with officials from Hamas, Israel and elsewhere, the report
observed that, "far more than Fatah, Hamas has proved a disciplined
adherent to the cease-fire, and Israeli military officers readily
credit this for the sharp decline in violence. In recent statements,
Hamas leaders have not ruled out changing their movement's charter,
negotiating with Israel or accepting a long-term truce on the basis of
an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines." Underlining the depth of
Hamas' ideological shift since its charter was adopted in 1988, the
paper judged that "today, their electoral platform is in these
respects closer to Fatah's outlook than to Hamas' founding
principles."
Perhaps the single most knowledgeable observer of Hamas in the West is
Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer who served as
liaison to the Palestinian National Authority for the European Union
from 1997 to 2003 and worked closely with CIA director George Tenet. In
a private policy paper distributed to E.U. officials at the time of the
January elections (cited in UPI, 2/2/06), Crooke wrote that Hamas'
growing willingness to support a comprehensive halt to violence and
negotiations with Israel leading to two states represented an
unprecedented opportunity for peace, since, unlike during the Oslo
years, "the results of such talks would actually be implemented by a
disciplined movement with a mandate from its own people"-i.e.,
Hamas. Such a deal "offers the best chance for an enduring
settlement" with Israel, Crooke judged.
Peace vs. disengagement
But an "enduring settlement" along those lines was of little
interest to the Israeli leadership. Israel's current policy toward
the Palestinians dates back to late 2003, when Ariel Sharon engineered
a wrenching ideological shift of his own. Breaking from decades of
Israeli doctrine, which had always opposed the dismantling of any
Jewish settlements in the occupied territories before a final and
comprehensive settlement with the Palestinians, Sharon announced plans
to unilaterally withdraw all settlers and soldiers from Gaza and hinted
at a few further withdrawals in the West Bank. He called this strategy
"disengagement."
Ha'aretz diplomatic editor Aluf Benn (Washington Quarterly,
Spring/05) explained the strategy behind Sharon's "major policy
break":
What was Sharon doing? He explain[ed] that he wanted to preempt
[international] pressures for a deeper withdrawal, perhaps from
virtually all of the West Bank, and rebuild domestic consensus from
behind the new line. He opted to give away Gaza, with its dense
Palestinian population and minimal strategic value, for a longer and
stronger hold over most of the West Bank. Coupled with his planned
barrier route, Sharon and his aides argued that disengagement is not a
peace plan, but an attempt to dictate a new reality-an alternative to
negotiations, given the lack of a credible "partner." In theory,
Israel had exchanged Gaza for the West Bank, or territory for time.
Breaking away from the purists on the right-wing of his Likud Party who
rejected any dismantling of settlements, Sharon created a new election
vehicle, Kadima, as a standard-bearer for the unilateral policy, which
was soon dubbed "realignment." When the Israeli leader was
incapacitated by a stroke in January 2006, his deputy and successor,
Ehud Olmert, took up the mantle of the Sharon vision.
In a January 24 speech, Olmert signaled that he planned to proceed
"as soon as possible" to the unilateral "determination of
permanent borders of the State of Israel." Olmert's version of the
plan was foggy on the territorial details. But he made clear that
Israel would permanently "maintain control over the security zones,
the Jewish settlement blocs, and those places which have supreme
national importance to the Jewish people, first and foremost a united
Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty" (Federal News Service, 1/25/06).
Geoffrey Aaronson, a specialist on Israeli/Palestinian territorial
issues, estimated that such a border would run roughly along the
existing route of Israel's "separation barrier" and would involve
the annexation of about 10 percent of the West Bank (Report on Israeli
Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 5/6/06).
The Bantustan solution
Such a solution is anathema not only to Hamas but to virtually every
Palestinian figure of stature, including Palestinian National Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas. As Benn wrote, "under present circumstances,
no Palestinian leader will be willing, or able, to accept less" than
"a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza (with minor [1967]
border modifications on a quid pro quo basis) with East Jerusalem as
its capital."
The borders Olmert envisions, by contrast, are designed to interlace
the population centers of the western half of the West Bank, where
almost all the area's towns and villages are located, yielding a
barely contiguous territory that would permanently place the day-to-day
movement of goods and people within a Palestinian state at the mercy of
the Israeli authorities.
Such a state would be essentially non-viable. When the RAND Corporation
carried out a massive study on the economic and demographic prospects
for a Palestinian state (Building a Successful Palestinian State,
2005), its authors wrote: "This study concludes that none of the
major conditions of success-security, good governance, economic
viability and social welfare-can be realized unless Palestinian
territory is substantially contiguous"-defining contiguity as the
state's "size, shape and territorial coherence." A companion
study (The Arc: The Formal Structure of a Palestinian State, 2005)
featured maps projecting the shape of a feasible transport grid in the
West Bank. The maps make it obvious that under the final borders
demanded by Olmert, almost every major connecting route in the West
Bank would have to cross Israeli territory.
Thus, just as Hamas was inching toward acceptance of a long-term
understanding based on the 1967 borders, Sharon and Olmert were making
a bold and risky bid to avoid precisely such a settlement. Council on
Foreign Relations specialist Henry Siegman, a former head of the
American Jewish Congress, summarized it this way (New York Review of
Books, 4/27/06): "Hamas is not opposed to negotiations with Israel,
provided . . . that negotiations, when they are resumed, will take the
pre-1967 border as their starting point." But the group would remain
unshakably hostile to Sharon's policy of unilateralism, which
"continues to serve as the euphemism for Israeli policies that are .
. . concentrating the Palestinian population . . . in territorially
disconnected Bantustans that make a mockery of the promise of an
independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian state."
"Sworn to Israel's destruction"
As the Palestinian elections approached, the Israeli government had a
problem. Though few were predicting an outright Hamas victory, the
Islamists were widely expected to do well. A strong Hamas showing would
be a serious obstacle to Olmert's "realignment" strategy. Almost
a year before the vote, Ha'aretz's Danny Rubinstein (3/14/05)
predicted that if Hamas entered a governing Palestinian coalition,
"the rules will change in the Israeli/Palestinian negotiating
process. The Palestinian positions will stiffen enormously." On the
West Bank, for example, Palestinians would insist on discussing not
only the isolated settlements from which Olmert was willing to
withdraw, but also the 200,000 Israeli colonists in the three large
"settlement blocs," which, "as far as many Palestinians are
concerned-and certainly in the eyes of Hamas-are also
settlements."
Moreover, the more Hamas signaled that it might accept a two-state
solution along the 1967 borders-a position viewed as legitimate by
most of the world's governments-the more Sharon and Olmert would
find themselves pressured to negotiate with the Palestinian government.
One cabinet minister from the Labor Party, Olmert's main coalition
partner, explained the prime minister's attitude to negotiations this
way (Jerusalem Post, 6/23/06):
Sure, Olmert will have talks with Abu Mazen [i.e., Abbas]. But those
talks won't lead anywhere because we have no interest in their
successful consummation. We can then turn to our friends in the U.S.
and Europe and say, "You see, we tried, unsuccessfully; we now have
no choice but to go to realignment."
So in the run-up to the elections, the Israelis honed a simple
public-relations strategy. As described by one Israeli official
(Forward, 2/3/06), "the Israeli diplomatic corps worldwide has been
instructed to confront notions that Hamas might be an acceptable
interlocutor by reminding the international community that Hamas is a
terrorist organization sworn to the destruction of Israel."
"Sworn to the destruction of Israel." It's a vivid phrase that
deserves close attention. Most obviously, it evokes a violent
calamity-the obliteration of the Jewish state, with all the mayhem
and suffering that would entail. But the expression also paints an
indelible image of Hamas' single-mindedness. Even if the group wanted
to modify its stance, the words imply that Hamas couldn't do it. It
is sworn, bound by oath, to bring about Israel's cataclysmic demise.
It would be absurd to hope for a change in Hamas' policy, since such
a change would be a violation of its solemn word.
As a marketing catch-phrase, the "sworn to Israel's destruction"
formula was a smashing success. Since July 2005, the Associated Press,
probably the leading source of Middle East news for American newspaper
readers, has run scores of dispatches describing Hamas as "sworn to
the destruction of Israel" (8/13/05, 12/7/05, 12/16/05, 3/12/06) or
"sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state" (2/24/06, 3/5/06,
4/9/06) or "sworn to destroy Israel" (1/15/06, among half a dozen
others) or "sworn to the Jewish state's destruction" (7/3/06) or
"sworn to the destruction of [Olmert's] country" (5/26/06),
or-most popular-"sworn to Israel's destruction" (12/27/05, as
well as dispatches filed on more than 60 other dates).
Between December 24 and February 28, the New York Times published six
news stories and an editorial describing Hamas variously as "a
Palestinian party sworn to Israel's destruction" (1/27/06), a
"militant Islamic party sworn to the destruction of Israel"
(1/26/06), "an armed group, sworn to the destruction of Israel"
(1/25/06) or "an organization that revels in terrorism and is sworn
to destroy Israel" (editorial, 1/27/06). The same formulation was
used in news articles by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (8/14/05), L.A.
Times (1/26/06), Boston Globe (1/27/06), USA Today (2/20/06),
Philadelphia Inquirer (2/23/06) and Christian Science Monitor (3/6/06).
On television, the refrain was the same. "Hamas, the group sworn to
Israel's destruction, won a landslide victory," CNN's Carol Lin
announced (1/28/06). CBS's Bob Shieffer (1/27/06), interviewing
George W. Bush, observed that "of all things, the party that has
sworn to destroy Israel wins a majority of the seats in the Palestinian
parliament." "Sworn to the destruction of Israel, terrorism has
been their weapon" was how NBC's Martin Fletcher (1/24/06)
described Hamas. And ABC's Charles Gibson (1/26/06) put it like this:
"This is a group that is sworn to the destruction of Israel, will not
recognize Israel, says they will not talk to Israel, and says it will
not disarm."
Missed signals
There is no need to sugarcoat Hamas' history of brutal tactics or its
bellicose ideology. Its activists continue to rouse their supporters
with messianic rhetoric pledging to pursue the battle against Israel
until total victory is reached, and in its armed attacks across the
Green Line the group has seldom made the slightest effort to
distinguish innocent civilians from soldiers. But the characterizations
of Hamas' stance toward Israel quoted above range from incomplete to
misleading to flatly wrong.
Hamas' leaders are not of a single mind. They include both fiery
radicals who dismiss any suggestion of co-existence with Israel and
moderates whose views differ little from those of Abbas, a Fatah leader
who is considered a moderate. But over the months and years preceding
January's elections, the center of gravity within the group's
thinking had unmistakably shifted. Senior officials repeatedly signaled
that Hamas is open to changing its policy in favor of a long-term
peaceful accommodation with Israel; that it is willing to take concrete
steps toward this goal, provided that Israel reciprocates; and that it
would seriously consider moving even further given the right political
circumstances.
On more than one occasion, Hamas' chief representative in Lebanon,
Usama Hamdan, has outlined a stance toward the conflict with Israel
which, according to an ICG report (Enter Hamas, 1/06), "many who
study Hamas consider [to be] its emerging consensus." In an interim
agreement, Hamas and Israel would conclude a comprehensive armistice in
exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. After a period
of confidence-building, a formal agreement could be concluded. "Hamas
is clear in terms of [both] the historical solution and an interim
solution," Hamdan said. "We are ready for both: the borders of
1967, a state, elections and [a peace] agreement after ten to fifteen
years of building trust."
Yet in almost every case, the U.S. media failed to broadcast these
signals. For instance, four months before the elections, a moderate
Hamas candidate representing Nablus, Mohammed Ghazal, told Reuters
(9/21/05) that the group could change its 1988 charter calling for
Israel's destruction and that it was open to negotiating with Israel.
"The charter is not the Koran," Ghazal said. "Historically, we
believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now
about reality, about political solutions. . . . The realities are
different." If Israel reached a stage where it felt able to talk to
Hamas, Ghazal said, "I don't think there will be a problem of
negotiating with the Israelis." (Less than a week after Ghazal's
comments, Israeli soldiers raided his apartment and arrested him-AP,
9/27/05.)
Asked about the charter the following month, a leading Hamas hardliner,
Mahmoud Zahar, told Ha'aretz (10/26/05) that "no one is thinking
now about changing the charter, but in principle it is not
impossible."
The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Chicago
Tribune and USA Today all declined to report Ghazal's comments on
amending the charter. (The New York Times briefly noted Zahar's
statement in an article on a different topic-10/27/05.) Yet in
subsequent news articles each of these papers again went out of their
way to repeat that Hamas' charter pledges to bring about the
destruction of Israel (1/15/06, 1/26/06, 1/29/06, 1/23/06, 1/25/06,
1/16/06).
Meanwhile, for the previous five years, Israel had been governed by
Ariel Sharon's Likud Party, which maintained a charter pledged-one
could say "sworn"-to oppose any form of Palestinian
self-determination at all, vowing to "impose state sovereignty"
over "all parts of the Land of Israel." But this particular pledge
was apparently considered irrelevant: Since the Likud government's
formation in 2001, its charter was never mentioned by five of these six
papers. (The one exception: A 2002 Boston Globe
article-5/13/02-quoted a far-right Israeli politician who noted
that the Likud charter "states there will be no Palestinian
state.")
Two weeks before the elections, Hamas distributed to Palestinian voters
its official election platform, which pointedly omitted talk of
destroying Israel or restoring all of historic Palestine, calling
instead for "an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem." A
Hamas candidate in the Gaza Strip, Gazi Hamad, told the Guardian
(1/12/06) that "the manifesto reflected the group's position of
accepting an interim state based on 1967 borders but leaving a final
decision on whether to recognize Israel to future generations." The
New York Times (1/29/06) waited until three weeks after the election to
mention the platform; it did so, briefly, in an article headlined
"Hamas Leader Sees No Change Toward Israelis."
"Put this choice on Hamas"
The U.S. and Israel quickly formulated a strategy to deal with Hamas'
electoral victory. A front-page New York Times article (2/14/06)
sourced to Israeli and Western officials reported that the two
countries were "discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian
government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and
elections will be called again." The plan was to "starve the
Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the
point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is
compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be
so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a
reformed and chastened Fatah movement."
Officially, of course, Hamas was offered a choice: If it changed its
stance toward Israel by agreeing to a specific set of demands, it would
be given a chance to succeed. But the specific demands included the
immediate and unconditional recognition of Israel as well as acceptance
of all previous agreements with Israel signed by Yassir Arafat's PLO,
including George W. Bush's long-defunct "Road Map for Peace."
Nothing less than these moves-which would require Hamas' leaders to
immediately and publicly renounce 20 years of ideology, under a foreign
ultimatum-would be accepted. And they had to be unconditional; Hamas
could not demand reciprocity from Israel-a halt to the assassination
of its leaders, a general cease-fire, a commitment to a viable
Palestinian state or a change in Israel's settlement policies-in
exchange for concessions.
None of this was by accident. As the Times noted, "the officials
drafting the plan know that Hamas leaders have repeatedly rejected
demands to change and do not expect Hamas to meet them. 'The point is
to put this choice on Hamas' shoulders,' a senior Western diplomat
said. 'If they make the wrong choice, all the options lead in a bad
direction.'" The strategy was bolstered by the Bush
administration's success in convincing the European Union, which
provides most of the Palestinians' international aid, to sign on to
the demands as well. According to Alastair Crooke (Prospect, 6/06), an
insider in the E.U.'s Mideast diplomacy, most European officials had
grave doubts about the plan, but U.S. pressure and fears of reopening
European divisions had left them "trapped into adopting a position
from which they lack the leadership or energy to escape."
In the months after the election, Hamas officials desperately stepped
up their messages of willingness to reach a peaceful settlement,
deploying a series of trial balloons intended to find the right
formulation of words that could somehow satisfy at least parts of the
international community-Europe, basically-while preserving a
fig-leaf of fealty to Hamas' historic ideology. The tone and content
of these messages varied widely, depending on which Hamas leader
happened to be speaking-a reflection of both the party's diversity
of views and its policy of democratic centralism, in which members are
permitted to debate strategy publicly until such time as a final
position is formally adopted by party leaders.
By spring 2006, it seemed clear that the group was open to almost any
solution that did not cross the red line of recognition of Israel by
Hamas as a political party. As one Hamas leader (Hamas MP Riad Mustafa,
ICG report, 6/06; emphasis added) explained:
I say unambiguously: Hamas does not and never will recognize Israel.
Recognition is an act conferred by states, not movements or
governments, and Palestine is not a state. Nevertheless, the
government's program calls for the end of the occupation, not the
destruction of Israel, and Hamas has proposed ending the occupation and
a long-term truce (hudna) to bring peace to this region. That is
Hamas' own position. The government has also recognized President
Abbas' right to conduct political negotiations with Israel. If he
were to produce a peace agreement, and if this agreement was endorsed
by our national institutions and a popular referendum, then-even if
it includes Palestinian recognition of Israel- we would of course
accept their verdict. Because respecting the will of the people and
their democratic choice is also one of our principles.
"No sign Hamas will budge"
But the U.S. media studiously ignored these messages. For example,
after the election, CNN's Wolf Blitzer (1/29/06) aired a satellite
interview with Hamas hardliner Mahmoud Zahar, who was later appointed
foreign minister. Interspersed with rambling anti-Israel comments
expressed in broken English, Zahar outlined his party's stance toward
a settlement with Israel: "We can accept to establish our independent
state on the area before '67, and we can give [Israel] a long-term
hudna. . . . More than that, under certain conditions. . . . And after
that, let time heal . . . Give us one or two, 10, 15 years time in
order to see what is the real intention of Israel after that."
The following day (1/30/06), Blitzer re-aired an abridged version of
the interview. This time, following a soundbite of Bush demanding that
Hamas "support the right of Israel to exist," Blitzer flatly
declared: "There's no sign Hamas will budge on that issue." He
then ran brief clips from the previous day's interview, featuring
Zahar commenting on everything from homosexuality to Afghanistan to the
design of the Israeli flag-everything but the position Zahar had
outlined on a peace settlement. The closest Blitzer came to broaching
the topic was in this lead-in: "In refusing to back away from the
stated Hamas goal of destroying Israel, Al-Zahar pointed to the Israeli
flag"-followed by Zahar's musings on that subject.
In March, Hamas released its official legislative program. The document
clearly signaled that Hamas could refer the issue of recognizing Israel
to a national referendum. Under the heading "Recognition of
Israel," it stated simply (AFP, 3/11/06): "The question of
recognizing Israel is not the jurisdiction of one faction, nor the
government, but a decision for the Palestinian people." Neither the
New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune nor USA
Today mentioned this remarkable position.
The London Observer (4/9/06) reported that Hamas had announced a
decision to "abandon its use of suicide bombers . . . in any future
confrontations with Israel." Yihiyeh Musa, a Hamas legislator, told
the paper that Hamas had entered a "new era": "The suicide
bombings happened in an exceptional period and they have now
stopped," he said. "They came to an end as a change of belief."
Khaled Meshal, Hamas' unofficial leader and a staunch hardliner based
in Damascus, gave an interview to the Paris daily Le Figaro (3/29/06)
that included this statement: "If Israel withdraws from the West Bank
and East Jerusalem, recognizes the refugees' right of return, and
dismantles the new wall, I can guarantee you that Hamas, and the whole
Palestinian people behind it, will be ready to take serious steps,
based on justice and equality, towards a permanent peace with the
Israelis." No U.S. news outlet in the Nexis database reported his
comments.
The Prisoners' Initiative
That spring, Palestinian society was poised on a knife's edge.
International aid to the Palestinian National Authority had all but
dried up, leaving civil servants without salaries and essential
services grinding to a halt. Even more ominously, street clashes
between Fatah and Hamas gunmen, stemming largely from political
disputes over control of the security forces, threatened to plunge the
territories into civil war. And Israel continued to carry out targeted
assassinations, raids, house demolitions and the shelling of areas in
Gaza, which it often justified as a response to sporadic rocket attacks
by Palestinian militants.
Through intermediaries, Hamas offered Israel "an unofficial
understanding on 'quiet in return for quiet,'" in which "Hamas
would pledge not to carry out any violent actions against Israel and
would even prevent other Palestinian organizations from doing so," in
return for the same treatment from Israel. It even offered to arrange
the deal in such a way as to give the impression that this was a
unilateral Hamas move, "should Israel not want to appear to be
maintaining contact with a body that calls for its destruction." But
as Ha'aretz's defense correspondent Ze'ev Schiff reported
(4/7/06), Israeli officials called the offer a "trick" and rejected
it.
To make matters worse, on April 17, a suicide bomber from Islamic
Jihad, a particularly radical faction that had rejected the cease-fire
that Hamas had agreed to, killed nine Israelis at a falafel restaurant
in Tel Aviv. Rather than condemning the bombing, a Hamas Interior
Ministry spokesman called it "a direct result of the policy of the
occupation" (AP, 4/17/06), and a spokesperson for the party labeled
it a "legal and natural reaction to the Israeli crimes" (New York
Times, 4/18/06)-statements picked up and disseminated widely in U.S.
media, further damaging Hamas' standing internationally. The New York
Times highlighted the comments in its front-page headline the following
day ("Suicide Bombing in Israel Kills 9; Hamas Approves," 4/18/06),
proving that the paper sometimes does consider Hamas' words
newsworthy.
In the eyes of many Palestinian observers, this crisis could not be
resolved without some kind of joint program between Fatah and Hamas.
For years, civil society organizations and younger politicians had
urged the two groups to agree on a power-sharing formula and adopt a
common platform for negotiations with Israel. Not only would this
lessen the chances of civil conflict, they argued, but it would reduce
the risk that the party in opposition would carry out military
operations against Israel for the purpose of weakening the party in
power-an all-too-frequent phenomenon since the Oslo Accords were
signed. Indeed, in a reversal of roles, elements connected to Fatah had
been firing Qassam rockets into Israel since Hamas' election victory
"in order to embarrass the Hamas government and prevent it from
stabilizing" (Ha'aretz, 4/10/06).
On May 11, a prominent group of Hamas, Fatah and other Palestinian
prisoners in Israeli jails, enjoying enormous prestige and led by
Palestine's most popular political figure, Marwan Barghouti, released
a document laying out principles for such a joint program. In addition
to calling for a national unity government and the unification of
militias, it demanded "concentrating the resistance in territories
occupied in 1967"; negotiations with Israel led by Abbas, leading to
an independent state within the 1967 borders; and a unified Palestinian
"political discourse" based on "the Palestinian national
consensus program," "Arab legitimacy," and "international
resolutions fair to our people"-all code-words for a two-state
solution in which Israel would be recognized (ICG report, 6/06).
Two weeks later (5/25/06), Abbas stunned observers by issuing an
ultimatum to Hamas: If the Islamist group did not accept the
Prisoners' Initiative in its entirety by a specified deadline, he
would call a national referendum on it. Some Hamas leaders responded
with outrage, accusing the Palestinian president of trying to bring
down the elected government. Others welcomed a referendum. Street
fighting escalated and a fierce debate was sparked within the party.
But quietly, the two groups embarked on talks over the document.
The unrecognized recognition
As the entire world now knows, on June 25, militants from Hamas and two
other groups crossed the border into Israel and captured a soldier,
Corporal Gilad Shalit, in a raid that left two Israeli soldiers dead.
Israel responded with a massive invasion of Gaza. What is much less
known-because it was barely reported-is that two days later, after
weeks of secret negotiations, Hamas stunned observers with an
announcement that it had reached an agreement with Abbas to formally
accept the Prisoners' Initiative, a major change in the group's
stance toward Israel.
There has been enormous speculation about what connection, if any,
linked the two events. The facts, inevitably, are murky. Israeli leaks
suggested a split in Hamas, with Khaled Meshal using his influence over
Hamas' military wing to sabotage an initiative of Prime Minister
Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas moderate (AP, 6/26/06). Hamas sources claimed
the raid was unauthorized, the work of a rogue faction of the group's
military wing that no longer took Hamas' orders due to unpaid wages
and political disputes (Ha'aretz, 6/27/06).
What is clear is that the U.S. media, having studiously ignored
Hamas' internal debate for years, found itself unable to report
coherently on the Prisoners' Initiative. It was treated as major news
when Abbas, a favorite of the U.S. and of much of the media, first
issued his ultimatum demanding that the Islamists accept the document.
Much of the media praised it as a clever ploy to bring down the Hamas
government by forcing it to recognize the Jewish state-which Hamas,
of course, could never do. So despite the fact that the document
recognized Israel only implicitly (and fell far short of the Bush
administration's demands), reporters focused-with good reason-on
the clear two-state spirit of the text, rather than the letter.
Yet once the group had accepted the plan, much of the media could not
bring itself to acknowledge that Hamas-so recently "sworn to
Israel's destruction," in the journalistic lexicon-had now taken
a major step towards acceptance of Israel.
Consider the Associated Press' coverage. When Abbas first challenged
Hamas to accept the Prisoners' Initiative, the AP described the plan
as "accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel"; it would
"give implicit recognition to Israel by accepting a Palestinian state
on land occupied by Israel in 1967" (5/25/06). It endorsed "mutual
recognition and a two-state solution with Israel" (6/4/06); it called
for "recognizing Israel" (6/18/06), "implicitly recognizing
Israel" (6/19/06) or "tacitly recognizing Israel" (6/24/06). When
Hamas announced it had adopted the Prisoners' Initiative, AP reported
that the group had signed on to "a plan that implicitly recognizes
Israel" (6/27/06).
Two days later, with no explanation, AP abruptly reverted to the old
line. As Israel prepared for a massive invasion of Gaza, suddenly Hamas
was once again "sworn to Israel's destruction" (6/29, 6/30, 7/17,
7/18), "does not recognize the Jewish state" (7/11/06) and
"refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist" (6/28, 7/10,
7/11).
Likewise, the New York Times had called the Prisoners' Initiative
"a proposal for a Palestinian state that would recognize Israel"
(5/26/06), a "Palestinian state alongside an Israel that retreats to
its pre-1967 boundaries" (5/27/06); it was an accord that "would
move Hamas closer to recognition of Israel-a significant change"
(6/28/06).
But once Hamas accepted the deal, and Israel began its assault on Gaza,
Hamas was once again "pledged to destroy Israel" (7/19/06) and U.S.
officials were still hoping it would "respond to the responsibilities
of elected leadership and moderate its rejection of Israel"
(7/13/06).
In the meantime, Palestinians were still dying. And Israel still had no
peace.
Suppressing messages
Journalists who cover the Middle East know very well that, for good or
ill, the international media have always played a major part in the
region's conflicts. States and armies use the media, not only for
public relations, but to broadcast diplomatic signals that they hope
will catch the attention of world leaders-or at least world
audiences. When signals are heard, they can be reciprocated-and at
times they can lead to breakthroughs. Stances can shift, ideologies can
thaw, hardliners can be isolated, positions can be moderated.
When signals are ignored, however, the only possible result is further
war; offers are abandoned and the prospect of change disappears.
Journalists who choose to suppress these messages-preferring to take
the "guidance" of official sources who point insistently to the
other side's warlike "vows," "pledges" and "oaths"-can
then take empty satisfaction from seeing to it that no pledges will be
broken.

inside Israel since August 2004.
A parte che e' una cosa non dimostrabile, non esistono solo gli
*ATTACCHI SUICIDI* per distruggere uno stato.
Infatti Hamas la tregua non l'ha mai rispettata.
Taglio il resto delle stronzate, visto che manca l'onesta intellettuale
minima anche solo per capire che una "tregua" non riguarda solo gli
attacchi suicidi e che il terrorismo non si compie solo con essi.
-Stefano

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
news:456018EF...@people.it...

...disse il bue all'asino...
Se lo dici tu
*pat pat*