|
Monday, 20 February (36 days to election day)
We hate Hamas. Who wouldn't?
We hate them for what they have done to us, the masses of innocent people they have murdered, orphaned, maimed for life.
We hate them, as well, because they scare us to death. No one likes to live scared. No one likes to admit to it, least of all Israelis.
We hate thinking about them. How they got to where they are. In a democratic election. We hate thinking about how popular they are with the Palestinian people. We hate thinking about having fostered them at first. We hate thinking about having to deal with them now.
We hate them, in part, because we can't trust them, and, in part, because we can't forgive them. We hate them for our being confused. And no wonder.
We hate thinking that the hudna might be working. We hate thinking about the reasons for a precipitous drop in the number of Israelis killed over the last year.
We hate thinking that only terrorists can get terrorists to hold their fire.
We hate our own confusion, and we blame Hamas, not without justification. Hamas issues mixed messages twice daily.
We hate our inability to interpret them. Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said this week that Hamas would aim for a long-term cease-fire, in order to curry international favor.
But while terror casualties had dropped, Diskin continued, attempts were on the rise. Qassam attacks, the work of Fatah and the Islamic Jihad but with clandestine help from some Hamas munitions men, rose from 64 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel in December to 130 in January, and the pace only builds.
On Monday, Diskin went further, saying that even if a hudna (truce) lasts for 10 years, Hamas remains a long-range threat to Israel's security.
In the short term, we know there are likely to be more terror attacks, if only because we have killed one Islamic Jihad commander after another, and the Jihad and Fatah Al Aqsa live for nothing like they live for revenge.
There are those among us who hate those among us who even think about this. They want us to fight the Palestinians to the death, all of them, once and for all, in that blissful illusion that such a thing were even possible. Many of those who urge the fight to the death, incidentally, live six to eight time zones away.
Meanwhile, all of us hate the insecurity that comes of trying to interpret the statements that point toward a profound change in Hamas.
We hate, perhaps most of all, to think that we could be wrong.
We hate it to death. So much so, that there is no easy way to literally translate into Hebrew the simple expression ?I am wrong.?
It scares us to death to suspect the near-indigestible possibility that Hamas may be just what we needed.
But maybe just this once it might be time to hold back on the jeremiads, the unequivocal pronouncements, the unqualified judgments that we love so much.
And which, even coming from the Shin Bet, are so often so wrong.
There is no question that for more than a decade, Hamas reigned as the unchallenged empire of local terror. They killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings. They vowed to bury the state and see its Jews expelled.
They have run our lives for longer than we know. Oslo died because Hamas was there to kill it.
Hamas sent wave after wave of suicide bombers to finish the job that Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein had started.
Now, once again, Hamas is the central issue in this campaign.
But what does it mean that the polling numbers haven't changed in a month? That is to say, the shocking Hamas victory on January 25 did not change Israelis' perceptions of the bedrock reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It means the jury's still out on Hamas. Perhaps within Hamas as well.
Something is happening within the organization, something which has never happened before.
Can we trust them? No more than they can trust us, which is to say, not at all.
All we can trust is what the Palestinians want themselves. Shockingly, they didn't vote in Hamas to finish us off. They want jobs, security, social welfare, honest officials.
Shockingly, to Israelis, the Palestinians didn't vote Hamas because they want us dead. They voted Hamas because they want a life.
Contrary to the repeated extermination camp blather of supremely self-satisfied Lawrence of Arabia leftists, Israel is not about to starve the Palestinians or engage in collective punishment. No more, that is, that we've been doing on a routine basis, left and right, Labor and Likud, since the 70s.
Then what is all of this? Beyond it all, we hate thinking that Hamas might be telling the truth.
The right drills the refrain that we should believe them, believe them, believe every word, when Hamas says in its charter that Israel should be eliminated.
We were instructed by the right to believe every word Hamas said when they said there was no room here for the Jews. None at all. Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
So if Hamas was telling the truth and nothing but the truth before, why should we staunchly refuse to believe Hamas now if it says - in public, clearly, in so many words - that there's been a change?
"Today, there is something new. There's been a change today," Hamas activist Razi Hamid, editor of a Hamas newspaper in Gaza, said this week.
"In the past, Hamas said we were against elections, against the [idea of the] Palestinian Authority, against participation in the government. Today, Hamas is taking part in the elections, in the government," Hamid told Army Radio in Hebrew. "In the new political situation, Hamas is speaking today of a political solution, a cease-fire, we are ready to talk about agreements. There has been a substantive change within Hamas."
Where the Hamas Charter speaks of "an end to the conflict and the end of the occupation," Hamas, from Khaled Meshaal on down, is speaking clearly of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamid said.
"This is a new page today. We agree to an independent Palestinian state with the 1967 borders," Hamid said. "Today there is an opportunity to reach a political settlement."
Here's the truly scary part. What if we can trust them?
We knew we couldn't trust Arafat. We know that the Arafat-led Authority, in its final form, was the last thing we needed. In an effort to garner tactical advantage both in peace talks and within Fatah, Arafat brought us the worst war in more than a generation, more Israeli dead than in Lebanon. Arafat fostered, in essence, a second Yom Kippur War.
To the extent that the taadia has worked it has worked becuase Hamas, for its own reasons, willed it so. The Al Aqsa Martyrs, sponsored by Fatah and the Islamic Jihad, sponsored by Iran, have done everything they could to destroy it.
Israelis know terror as well as anyone in the world. You make the perverse calculations - they hit this mall last week, this street yesterday, so the security will be better there now. You know when it's going on, and whn it's not. You know it in your bones. And they know relative calm as well.
Now the settlers and the far-right, who have the most to lose from a cease-fire - settlements - are going out of their way to prove that terrorism is rampant.
But the taadia, a relative calm at best, has held to a remarkable extent, especially considering the large number of Israeli assassination missions, and the economic state of the Palestinians, which is criticially poverty stricken even by traditional Gaza refugee camp standards of misery.
We know they were telling the truth when they said there was no living with us.
The right will say that Hamas is lying now just to gain temporary advantage. They still want us out of here.
Some surprise. We want them out of here, too. Just as much.
We both failed in trying. Perhaps both of our peoples are finally ready to try something new. Living apart, and going on living.
|
