This is an excellent article from Haaretz. It touches on how Israel has sabotaged every opportunity for peacein the past, and Hamas has been demonized to the point that that many are unwilling to recognise how its importance and how it is a very different beast to ever before.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/677157.html
The thing that drives one crazy about the Hamas victory is first of all the defeat of the Israeli brain. Not because Hamas swept the vote against all our assessments; that often happened to Mina Tzemach, too. What gives rise to concern is that the Israeli government is not free of the curse of the conception. The mistaken assessment stemmed from a dust-covered way of thinking. It has for years dictated the animosity to Hamas, just as political idiocy had previously turned the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah into Satan and Satan’s spawn.
Never mind that it was that way at the beginning, when Israeli governments both left and right tried to promote failed organizations like the Village Leagues as partners. But the lesson should have been learned. After people who met with the PLO were sent to jail (even Ezer Weizman once faced that threat), handshakes were exchanged on international lawns. How did it happen? Because at a very damagingly late date, it was realized that they represented the Palestinian majority. Even then, all governments after Rabin turned up their noses at them. Ehud Barak talked with Yasser Arafat as if he were a mafioso who had to be made an offer he could not refuse.
In the foggy Israeli thought process, there were, it will be recalled, times when the good fellows at political-military assessment winked at Hamas, in the idiotic belief that it would weaken the PLO. Even when it was clear to the most junior officer in research at the Intelligence Branch that Hamas was taking control of the Palestinian street, we killed their leaders as if each of them were ticking like a bomb. The American ally helped deepen the conception. A simplistic White House adopted us in a bear hug, the more Israel contributed to the demonization of Hamas. So, too, it applauded, from the Lebanon War to the Oslo talks, the blackening of Arafat. Later, we tormented his moderate heir. Whenever Sharon was to meet with him, his cNo Israeli official of any import contended that channels should be created to the rising Palestinian power. The conception turned talk like that into a roadside bomb for any politician. Even now, after the numbers are speaking clearly, the historic hatred toward all dominant Palestinian power goes on. Indeed, Hamas is now impacting local politics in a way that is almost sick. The Likud went up in the polls immediately after the elections in the territories. Why? Only because spinmaster Benjamin Netanyahu changed his moderate stance from last week (a previous survey had said that moving to the center would help him) and was back talking about Hitler and the Nazis.
Meanwhile, it is Hamas that has been careful to move to the center. Not that they’ve started reciting Herzl. Number 1, Ismail Haniyeh, said the Oslo Accords had hurt Arab land, but they had become a fact and Hamas would not try “to achieve the impossible.” Next in the line of leadership, Mahmoud al-Zahar, who twice escaped with his life from a targeted killing and whose son was killed recently, spoke in a similar vein. Television enjoyed mocking the hennaed beard of Mahmoud Abu Tir, number two on the Hamas national list, until in the first interview with Tzvi Yehezkeli from Channel 10 he spoke good and comfortable Hebrew, learned, of course, over 22 years in our prison. He sounded to the Israeli ear just about the way Ovadia Yosef sounds to Tommy Lapid. One can speak to them more rationally about the Zionist entity than one can with the Satmar rabbis.
They will be forced to behave as will be necessary in order continue to do what brought them to power: seeing to the livelihood of a downtrodden population. Without moderation, in a few months they will have no money from the West and from Israel, without which their main agenda, which is not to throw the Jews into the sea, will be wiped out. From this side, election season will dumb down even further the talk about the Palestinian leadership. But after all, it will not be long before we will have to talk to it. Why not initiate the talks and hold them to their word when it turns out that they are no more monstrous than the PLO and Fatah seemed at the time? There can be only one reason: Israel has forgotten nothing and learned nothing after dozens of years of accursed policy blunders.
alendar burst at the seams with previous engagements.
