A Wall Street Journal piece today describes the battle that ensued after the Israeli army rescued four hostages in Gaza this weekend. There were two targets, and the rescue went smoothly at one of them. At the other, Hamas militants attacked as the rescuers tried to get out:
A shootout that started Saturday in one of the homes expanded into a full-on gunbattle on the packed streets of Nuseirat between the commandos and responding Israeli forces and militants, the Israeli military said. With the teams’ cover blown, the Israeli Air Force began striking dozens of militant targets in a bid to divert Hamas’s attention and give the hostages a fighting chance to get out.
In the crossfire, a vehicle packed with special forces and hostages was hit and disabled, said David Tsur, the former commander of Yamam, the Israeli police team that carried out the extraction. An Israeli armored vehicle then swooped in to rescue the rescuers, but it too was disabled by fire, so another force arrived to deliver the hostages to helicopters waiting to take them to Israel, reported Army Radio, an independent news organization run by the Israeli military.
....Some Palestinians said the operation drove home again the perception that their lives mean nothing, including to Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that carried out the Oct. 7 attacks, killing about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages.
This is a microcosm of 70 years of war. Nobody on the Arab side has ever really cared about the Palestinians, but they keep fighting anyway—and losing. Hamas will continue sacrificing both itself and the Palestinian population forever even though they have exactly zero chance of accomplishing anything.
There is no answer to this. The two sides have irreconcilable demands that they're willing to fight for. So they do. But neither side has any chance of winning in any durable way. Hamas plainly can't win, but neither can Israel. Even if, against all odds, they destroyed Hamas, they would only be destroying a name. The same hatreds would still be there and would simply coalesce into another group.
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin followed by the failure of the 2000 peace talks sealed the fate of the Mideast. There has been no serious possibility of reconciliation since then, and it will likely be decades before there's another one.
Ah! Yet another "Let's just wash our hands of it!" while continuing to fuel the violence by sending weapons and money to Israel. It isn't that simple, and this solution disregards any issues of ethics.
Many have pointed out that it wasn't necessary to maim some 800 Palestinians and kill nearly 300 because the Israeli Occupation Forces effed up and didn't have the smarts to withdraw while they still could. It has been reported that the Occupation Force alsos killed three of their own Israeli hostages in the bloodbath of their "brilliant" operation, which everybody in Israel is celebrating.
Meanwhile, a workable cease fire and return of probably ALL hostages had been on the table for weeks. But Bee-Bee wanted to play Entebbe instead. More opportunites for massive "collateral damage."
70 dead kids on this one.
IDF commander: Soldier! If you see any 10-year-old girls then shoot them in the face!
IDF soldier: Sir! Yes, sir!
Hamas chose to take and hold civilian hostages in violation of the laws of war.
Hamas then chose to hold those hostages among civilians, making it inevitable tht innocents would be killed in any rescue attempt.
Hamas is responsible for these deaths just as a kidnapper is responsible for the deaths of any innocent civilians killed when the police rescue his victim. When this war is over any surviving Hamas leaders (hopefully very few) should be tried for murder for the deaths of these people.
As for the Israelis withdrawing,
1. The deaths apparently mostly happened when the Israelis were withdrawing.
2. The Israelis have no obligation to withdraw or abanedon their people because Hamas chooses to surround them with human shields.
3. The Israelis obviously were able to withdraw. The dead civilians' blood is on Hamas's hands.
Hamas chose to take and hold civilian hostages in violation of the laws of war.
The Israelis choose to support settler terrorism in the West Bank, in violation of the laws of war. I'd be somewhat more sympathetic to the Israeli demand that they be allowed to kill unlimited numbers of civilians in order to fight terrorists if they had any principled objection to terrorism, but they don't. They are just fine with terrorism, so long as it is targeted at the right people.
Hamas is responsible for these deaths just as a kidnapper is responsible for the deaths of any innocent civilians killed when the police rescue his victim
This isn't true in either case. Police often share responsibility when innocent civilians are killed trying to rescue hostages.
When this war is over any surviving Hamas leaders (hopefully very few) should be tried for murder for the deaths of these people.
Do you have any principled objections to terrorism, or do you think that Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich shouldn't be prosecuted for the acts of their followers?
I'm betting that, just like the Israeli government, you are just fine with terrorism, so long as it is targeted at the right people.
1. The deaths apparently mostly happened when the Israelis were withdrawing.
Which isn't relevant to anything.
2. The Israelis have no obligation to withdraw or abanedon their people because Hamas chooses to surround them with human shields.
But they are still obligated to obey the laws of war. They made the tactical choice to call down heavy airstrikes when a firefight began, which was a perfectly foreseeable event. Pretending that there was no way that they could anticipate killing hundreds of civilians is dishonest.
A kidnapper can't be responsible for all and any deaths of innocent civilians in rescue operations, logically or legally.
By your statement, if a police officer notices a victim is a person they know and happen to have distaste for, and then walks up and shoots them in the back of the head, this is the kidnappers responsibility.
It isn’t as though Netanyahu cares much about Israeli lives, either; he’s just careful to conceal is disregard. By drawing down troop numbers in Gaza City, he allowed Hamas to regroup there, so now the IDF has to engage them again. Bibi will be perfectly happy to have the IDF chase Hamas around Gaza for years, north to south and then back again. At least until he can start a war with Hezbollah and make it look like their fault.
"Nobody on the Arab side has ever really cared about the Palestinians, but they keep fighting anyway"
Nobody on the Israeli side has ever really cared about the Palestinians, but they keep fighting anyway.
Here is an interesting YouTube on Israel's positions about the Palestinians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo
Again this is a reminder that Drum doesn't really know the history that well, and grew up with the kindergarten version of history used to justify Israeli apartheid. I know it is done in a pox on both houses form, but the result is that nothing should be done and Israeli apartheid should continue.
What this misses, by apparently not even being aware of the fact, is that in 2000 Mahmood Abbas, the representative of the Palestinians, offered the Jewish minority a state on 78% of the shared homeland with (almost) all of the refugees from that 78% allowed to return only to the Palestinian 22%. He even agreed that in the short term the Palestinian 22% would not be an actual state with most of the powers of a state. It would only be something that could evolve into a state over time. The biggest problem with the Abbas offer is that it may not have given the Palestinians enough to have a viable state. The Israelis rejected this and insisted it needed to keep part of the Palestinian 22% as Israel, and not just any part, by parts that cut off the Palestinian capital from the largest Palestinian territory. That is the Israeli position was that the Palestinians shouldn't even get what they should already have under the laws of occupation.
When Drum says nothing has happened since 2000 he is apparently ignorant of what the PA has done during that time. Of course what Israel has done since that time is to accelerate its settlement behavior to make the changes needed to bring about peace harder and harder.
Even before 2000 this description is a bit slanted since the Palestinians spent the peace process (1993-2000) working to make the chances of peace more plausible, and Israel spent that period working to make the chances of peace less plausible. In 2000 the US insisted, based on no evidence, that if the Palestinians offered peace the Israelis would go for it. The Palestinians insisted that Israel was making it clear that it had no interest in peace and so an offer of peace would be a unilateral concession leading to nothing. The evidence all supports the fact that the Palestinians were right.
This is the corrosive effect that the US has had on peace negotiations based on this kindergarten story that Drum still seems to largely accept. In the 90s the Palestinians were working towards peace while Israel worked against peace. US policy was that pressure had to be put on the Palestinians, and certainly not the Israelis to get to peace. Today Hamas has agreed to various ceasefire proposals while Israel has insisted it has to keep slaughtering Palestinians. The US supports a ceasefire. So naturally our public position is that pressure has to be put on Hamas to get it to continue to agree to a ceasefire, while Israel should be reminded that we have her back no matter what.
A good summary, with the zionist blinders removed.
Well, you're off by quite a few years, right? The 2000-2001 meetings, culminating in the Taba conference, was when Arafat was the head of the Palestinian leadership, not Abbas, who became the head in 2005.
In the Taba Conference, Israel offered 97% of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. Arafat walked away from those discussions, and started the Second Intifada in order to pressure the Israelis. Unfortunately, he failed in job 1 -- know your enemy. The resulting suicide bombings convinced Israelis to go with Likud governments and Israelis elected Ariel Sharon. The Labor party in Israel never recovered, and indeed Likud has governed every year but three since 2000. The Second Intifada convinced a large number of Israelis that the Palestinian leadership would never agree to a peace deal.
You're probably thinking of some discussions that happened in 2008. Those talks ended in September 2008 with both sides claiming the other didn't return to the negotiating table. But by then, Labor was essentially a rump party, Israel had built the separation barriers and Hamas and the PA were splitting the Palestinians and would shortly be at war in Gaza. The bulk of Israelis didn't trust the Palestinians at all after the Second Intifada.
Why has Kevin given up? Well, both sides prefer war to peace. The Israelis never stopped building settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinians have never dropped their request for the right of return of 1948 refugees and their descendants to Israel proper, nor has Hamas forsworn violence (obviously). For the Palestinians, the Second Intifada was a self-inflicted disaster, as was electing Hamas in Gaza. The Israelis for their part have no plan to grant any political rights to 5 million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, and have been stealing Palestinian land through state sanctioned settler violence essentially forever.
What's frustrating is that anyone with two neurons knows that the Israelis aren't going to commit demographic suicide and the Palestinians aren't going to accept being second class non-citizens. So the only workable scheme is two states with a Palestinian State on the West Bank and Gaza, and some connection between them. All West Bank settlements will be removed or put under Palestinian jurisdiction, maybe with a few exceptions via equal land swaps. No right of return to Israel proper. Split Jerusalem or make it an independent city.
You are right that there was a typo, it should have said 2008. Later I put that in the since 2000 category which could have made clearer that it was a typo, but oops.
The rest of your comment is the usual pro-Israel nonsense. When people talk about Israel offering 97% (of the 22% that actual peace activists want) they leave out that the 3% is not territory to make Israel more defensible, but rather territory which turns the idea of a Palestinian state into a joke. Barak actually tried to justify his offer on the grounds that it only completely bisected the West Bank in one place. By that he meant that to go from the northern West Bank to the southern West Bank one would have to cross Israeli checkpoints (Necessary so that Israel could completely control the border between Jordan and "Palestine") but to go from one neighboring village to another one could avoid the Israeli checkpoints by going miles out of one's way. If this sounds like occupation there is a good reason for that. Israel offered the Palestinians 97% of the territory in the sense that inmates are 97% free because the prison walls and bars don't take up a lot of space.
In the real world the talks fell apart because Barak was voted out of office. The second intifada was a response to Sharon's march on the Temple Mount. It began, as such organic protests generally do, with Palestinians vandalizing Palestinian stores. Israel decided that it would end security cooperation with the Palestinians and put the uprising down with force. To use your phrase, this showed they did not understand their enemy, and things got worse for them. If you want to understand why so many Israelis died during the second intifada you should chart Israeli assassinations of Palestinian leaders and terrorist attacks on Israel. You will see that the latter generally follows the former. And that it was the end of the assassination policy that led to the end of the second intifada.
Also, as I noted above, Olmert and Abbas worked out a deal on the refugees that avoided the demographic Now you are the one confusing 2000 and 2008. The funny thing is that the peace plan you are describing is precisely what Abbas offered Olmert and what you claim neither side will go for. The Israeli encouraged fighting between the PA and Hamas happened before 2008. It has always been more of an excuse than a reason for avoiding peace. The destruction of peace has all happened in the West Bank with Israel abusing the security cooperation by the PA. The West Bank is also by far the large territory with the larger population. If Israel wanted peace it could have moved towards peace. Gaza could either follow or be left behind. The only real lasting consequence of the second intifada is that it got the settlements removed from Gaza. That could have made peace easier. But that was not Israel's intention.
So it is not that filling in the details of the story I told is irrelevant, it does a good job of showing that the basic story I told was right. Israel has worked against peace. The Palestinians have offered peace. Israel has done a good job of tricking people who are satisfied with apartheid to miss that fact.
What has led to right wing dominance of the political scene is not directly the second intifada, it is the fact that apartheid can only be maintained through brutality, and the right is better at brutality.
Taking hostages is indefensible...full stop. Obviously Hamas still is a strong, effective fighting force...against the idea that Gaza was an open aired prision...sure a prison that effectively smuggles in Anti-Tank weapons and a host of other armaments...that again, are obviously being put to hot and heavy use.
Hamas could have released the hostages, Hamas could have allowed the rain to simply succeed and allowed the withdraw of the Hostages and the IDF...the Palestinian population could turn on Hamas.
None of the above happened or is happening.
War is hell on earth...pretty simple.
(As an aside, I am somewhat surprised how effective Russian body armor is, as is I suppose is Ukrainian body armor...the torso seems well protected, legs and feet not so much...the most valuable part your kit seems to be these leg tourniquets...that wounded people keep strapping round their legs.) Bad times for the wounded. Traveller
????????
I agree with your sentiment on taking hostages.
How do you feel about the ~7000 Palestinian hostages held by Israel. Oh, they're not hostages, but rather "detainees"? hahaha
Look on the bright side. All those killed are in paradise with Allah, Jesus, and wherever Jewish people go. That’s the value of religion. It means we don’t have to a care when they die.
How many infants is Israel holding? Answer: None.
Detaining fighters and people who are suspected of fighting is totally legal in a war.
In comparison, see the Bibas brothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_the_Bibas_family. One was nine months old, one was four years old. Perhaps you will claim they were Israeli fighters?
The current war can only end when Hamas is destroyed and the vast majority of its members are dead or captured, tried, and imprisoned, preferably for life.
Detaining fighters and people who are suspected of fighting is totally legal in a war.
It's a lot more complicated than this. Sometimes it's legal, and sometimes it's not. If someone is identifiable as a member of the other side's armed forces, then you are correct that they can be held as POWs. However, there are laws on how POWs must be handled, and the Israelis do not come close to obeying them.
If someone is not specifically identifiable as a member of the armed forces, then their case must be adjudicated. The Israelis don't do this at all. They are holding thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention with no charges, no right to an attorney, and no right to see the evidence against them.
That's not legal.
One was nine months old, one was four years old. Perhaps you will claim they were Israeli fighters?
In comparison, see Ali Saad Dawabsheh.
https://www.haaretz.com/2015-07-31/ty-article/palestinian-infant-burned-to-death-in-arson-attack/0000017f-f7e4-ddde-abff-ffe5a0f60000
He was 18-months old when he was burned to death by settler terrorists.
The current war can only end when Hamas is destroyed and the vast majority of its members are dead or captured, tried, and imprisoned, preferably for life.
The current war can only end when the Israelis end their military occupation. That is, itself, an act of war.
Peace will happen when the people of Israel love their children more than they hate those of the Palestinians.
I wonder what percentage of people who read your comment will get it. It is a good comment, but will likely go over most people's heads.
I'm not particularly smart; I'm just running with an older and older crowd as time goes by, sigh.
Your point is that Gaza couldn't be an open air prison because weapons don't get smuggled into prisons? You may be a bit naive about what prisons are like.
Hamas could have released the hostages, Hamas could have allowed the rain to simply succeed and allowed the withdraw of the Hostages and the IDF...the Palestinian population could turn on Hamas.
And the Israelis could stop promoting terrorism by settlers in the West Bank. They could make sure that the inhabitants of the 18 Palestinian villages that this terrorism has forced to abandon their homes could be allowed to return under the protection of the authorities that are legally obligated to protect them. The Israeli population could turn on the governments that allow this terrorism.
None of the above happened or is happening.
War is hell on earth...pretty simple.
Even moreso when both sides refuse to obey the laws of war.
With the proviso that one side -- the stronger one -- refused to obey the laws of war first.
I completely agree with Mr. Drum’s perspective. There is no answer. Not only that, but the US government will NEVER stop selling weapons to Israel. ???? that would be funny, though. Neither the democrats or republicans in congress will ever stop it. Cry all you want about it.
So, as usual, the Palestinian civilian deaths were totally 100%, the fault of Hamas. Hamas took the hostages on 10/7, even though there was no “occupation” of Gaza at all. Israel got the hostages without any civilian deaths (just the hostage-keepers) and were leaving. And then Hamas started firing at the Israelis, even though it was in the middle of a civilian area, so the Israelis had to fire back in self defense. Hamas could have let them go and NO civilians would have died.
Just pure evil, just like the Hamas supporters here in the US.
To say nothing of the horrible guilt the Israeli soldiers must feel, being forced by Hamas to kill civilian after civilian after civilian, powerless to stop! Is there no end to the crimes these Palestinians will commit?
+10.
Had the Israelis intended to kill civilians the could have done so at any time at the beginning of the rescue attempt, but they didn’t because they are good civilized people. ONLY once Hamas began firing at the hostages being rescued, and the rescuers, did the civilians get caught in the crossfire.
Again, 100% to blame are the evil Hamas. If you choose to support that evil, that’s on you.
Oh. I actually thought your first post was satire. >250 civilians killed, one IDF soldier. But, sure, it was a tense shoot out where the Israelis barely escaped and sadly Hamas killed everyone around in the process. (that was sarcasm)
Most moral army in the world, baby! (also sarcasm)
If the Israelis wanted to kill Palestinian civilians, it would not take much time, effort, or casualties for them to kill 75% yo 90% of the people in Gaza.
Yes and then Israel loses the vast majority if not all of it's remaining allies and assumes the role of premier international pariah state for committing the worse moral crime of this young century. Bombing millions of people to death.
We're a laugh and a half MF for positing that because Israel isn't committing a massive atrocity of historic scale that it must indicate their protocols and standards around civilian casualties are good.
It's antisemitic to argue that Israelis have agency over their own actions.
I'll lead off by saying I am disgusted by the Israeli government, and don't trust them as far as I could throw them. I believe it's no coincidence that the second hostage rescue in this whole war came just as Benny Gantz was getting ready to leave the "War Cabinet". And if true, that means Netanyahu has chosen to prioritize his political survival over everything, both Israeli and Palestinian lives. The man -- and the government he leads -- is despicable.
But that said, the suggestion that Israel should have "withdrawn" and abandoned its own, because Hamas threw civilians into the line of fire? To sacrifice its own civilians for the lives of enemies? No. No country on earth would do that, and no country on earth would be expected to do so.
Peace will happen when the people of Israel love their children more than they hate those of the Palestinians.
The Israelis should have planned better than to decide that, if a firefight broke out, they would dump large amounts of high explosives into an area full of civilians.
Please tell us what magic weapon could be used instead.
Indeed, I think we can all be 100% certain that not a single Israeli or Jew cares about the lives of Hamas.
The exception being the sadists who would like to torture members of Hamas for as long as they can keep them alive.
No. Look at Jewish Voice for Peace and such groups. They clearly support Hamas.
For the rest of us, we care very much about the lives of Hamas members. We want to end those lives. The days of Jews marching peacefully to their deaths are over. You try to kill us, we will kill you.
While I very much agree that the failed peace talks in 2000 were a turning point, there actually are ways different sides can "win." Here are a few:
- Stuff like this alienate Western support turning Israel into a South Africa-scale pariah. Economic boycotts undermine Israel sufficiently to fundamentally change the war/peace/power equations.
- Stuff like this undermines Palestinian support for Hamas and some alternative power emerges. (It's really too bad the PA can't find someone a little more compelling than Abbas).
- Stuff like this finally gets Netanyahu out of power and/or something like the Biden plan actually starts to gel.
I am not predicting that any of this WILL happen, but merely that there are avenues where the fundamental facts can change and open up new possibilities. Things seem to be largely stuck in the same general rut for the last couple decades, but things can change.
Another piece that ignores the PA. BTW there are more Palestinians under the PA in the West Bank than live in Gaza.
I see no evidence the PA would turn down a good deal (soverign Palestinian state and borders decently comparable to pre-1967).
It is easy to throw your hands up in despair if you ignore the most reasonable of the three parties in the conflict and ignore that Israel propped up Hamas for many years because the PA was dangerously reasonable.
I hesitate to call Fatah particularly reasonable, though maybe they are the closest to reasonable of all of the unreasonable parties to this conflict. Their corruption is spectacular, and they have shown no capacity to govern anything, even when the Israelis aren't cutting off their tax money.
The Palestinians *did* turn down a reasonable deal in the Taba conference, starting the 2nd Intifada instead.
Both sides are led by fools. They trade off who the worst fools are from year to year, although we may be at a local maximum for stupidity and evil on both sides right now.
If someone had made the offer to Jews that Barak made to the Palestinians anybody who called that reasonable would be easily identified as an anti-Semite. It was an offer of perpetual domination of the Palestinians by Israel. It is, of course, possible that you don't actually understand the offer and so are picturing a better offer in your head. But at the time the idea of the Palestinians accepting the offer was not a serious consideration. The issue was whether the Palestinians should respond to the offer, which made a fair offer on East Jerusalem but was otherwise just a call for perpetual occupation, by giving up the right of return in the hope that Israel would then make an actual peace offer. Interestingly Barak has claimed that he would not have done so. But he might have been lying about that.
"It's too hard to try to get my country to stop supporting Israeli apartheid, genocide, and other war crimes, so I'll just say there's nothing that can be done (except for the thing that can be done). And besides that would mean I agree with the Kids These Days that I like to disparage as not knowing anything, so I can't advocate for that."
This post, basically. And so many others like it.
Talk about 'irreconcilable differences': Palestinians see themselves as alive while Israelis see Palestinians as dead.
The question, IMHO, is not what the US should do to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The question is what should the US do to avoid damaging its brand. This means backing away from Israel now, since Israel is being inexorably drawn toward ever more extreme positions, creating ever more egregious actions on the world stage. If Netanyahu and the right wing in the Knesset want to use endless violence to secure Eretz Israel, there's little the US can do to stop them -- that much is already clear. But we can at least wash our hands of them.
I will never forget Benjamin Netanyahu's cold reaction to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
A shorter version of my other comment, but people like short. In the 90s peace in this conflict seemed more possible than peace in Northern Ireland because everybody who wanted peace knew what it was likely to look like. Today people think peace is impossible since Israel has spent every year since the 90s making it more difficult to get to that peace. The Palestinians have done nothing to make it harder to get to that peace. Even their violence has tended to create more of a move towards peace. (The two state solution was considered dead before 10/7 now it is at least back on life support, before the second intifada there were settlements in Gaza, now there are not).
The "both sides are working against peace" does not reflect reality. Hamas is awful, but they have been more open to the possibility of peace than the Isarelis have. To a degree this is not surprising. Israel has everything and so would have to give something up to get to peace (namely 22% of the land it wants). The Palestinians have nothing and so would gain from any peace. But that just shows how twisted the US view has been that the way to get peace is to put pressure on the Palestinians while protecting the Israelis from feeling pressured.
Didn't your mother teach you not to lie?
Here is the Hamas Charter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter
The charter criticizes the agreements reached in the Oslo Accords and rejects them as incompatible with international law.[1] It describes the state of Israel, created with the help of Western nations, as "entirely illegal" (bâtil in Arabic, meaning an invalid act or contract according to the sharia).[7]
Let's add.... https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf
2. Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.
3. Palestine is an Arab Islamic land. It is a blessed sacred land that has a special place in the heart of every Arab and every Muslim.
18. The following are considered null and void: the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution, and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them. The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah; it is also in violation of human rights that are guaranteed by international conventions, foremost among them is the right to self-determination.
19. There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.
20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
21. Hamas affirms that the Oslo Accords and their addenda contravene the governing rules of international law in that they generate commitments that violate the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. Therefore, the Movement rejects these agreements and all that flows from them, such as the obligations that are detrimental to the interests of our people, especially security coordination (collaboration).
22. Hamas rejects all the agreements, initiatives and settlement projects that are aimed at undermining the Palestinian cause and the rights of our Palestinian people. In this regard, any stance, initiative or political programme must not in any way violate these rights and should not contravene them or contradict them.
23. Hamas stresses that transgression against the Palestinian people, usurping their land and banishing them from their homeland cannot be called peace. Any settlements reached on this basis will not lead to peace. Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah.
A troll only a mother could love.
So, you think that a manifesto that proclaims the intent to take and hold all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and that rejects the Oslo Accords is sufficient proof that the organization should be dismissed as evil?
I just want to be clear on that before I start going through the manifestos of multiple parties in the current Israeli government.
I did not say that Hamas has been a force for peace. I said they have been better than Israel. That is a very low bar. And of course it does not mean that Hamas starts out with a call for peace. PLO refused to recognize Israel until the day that the PA agreed to recognize Israel.
But unlike Israel that has worked every year since the Oslo Accords were signed to make peace more difficult, when Hamas was elected to the Palestinian legislature it put out statements that the PA continued to hold the presidency and so it was their responsibility to negotiate with Israel for the Palestinians. That is weak tea, but it is still better than Israel consistently working against the possibility of peace.
There is a reason that supporters of Israel put so much weight on a political document that can be changed in the face of negotiations. They generally don't want peace, but don't want Israel to be blamed for the lack of peace. And if that is where you are your statement makes sense. It isn't easy defending Israel when its behavior has been so morally repugnant.
The Palestinians started the Second Intifada in 2000 in response to probably the best Israeli offer (see Taba Conference). The 2nd Intifada included lots of suicide bombings of places where young Israelis congregated, and essentially ended the Labor party in Israel.
Both sides are truly working against peace, and that's why we're probably a generation from peace today.
To some degree, I believe Israel is more at fault, as they could probably impose a reasonably fair agreement unilaterally and find some Palestinians who would work with them. Instead, Israel seems to believe in controlling the entire area, and keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of military occupation.
But there's no need to pretend that the Palestinians haven't walked away from opportunities for peace over and over and over again.
At Taba the US had a vision of getting to peace in which Barak's offer on East Jerusalem would be met by an offer on the right of return by the Palestinians, which would be met by an actual offer of peace by the Israelis. Nobody at the time confused what Barak was offering for peace. It left the West Bank a minefield of settlements, covered the entire territory with Israel only roads and had Palestinians going through checkpoints just to get from place to place. Sometimes they could avoid this by going miles out of their way to avoid a settlement built for the purpose of destroying the chance for peace. There may be nothing that shows the twisted way that the conflict gets discussed that that has transmogrified into the best offer the Israelis have made, and that that is not an indictment of the Israelis.
In fact the Palestinians did not make an offer on the right of return because there was no reason to think that Israel had an interest in offering peace. Israel had spent the entire peace process building up its settlements to make it harder to get to peace.
Your characterization of the second intifada is another victory for Israeli propaganda. The second intifada began with angry protests at a march by Sharon to the Temple Mount. The point of the march was to get precisely that reaction, which Sharon rode to office killing the peace process. The initial form of the second intifada was protests that mostly did damage to Palestinian stores. But Sharon declared that he was ending security cooperation with the Palestinians and tried to put the protests down with brutality. That did not work very well. The policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders worked even less well.
Olmert's offer in 2008 was actually better than Barak's offer. It was not good. It likely could never have resulted in peace. But at least it meets the low bar of being better than Barak's offer. By contrast, what Abbas was offering in 2008 probably could have led to peace. In fact it was more generous than what the US wanted Arafat to offer in 2000. The US was sure that Israel would respond to such an offer by agreeing to peace. It appears we were wrong and the Palestinians were right.