Wanted: Israeli strategic long-term thinking

Wanted: Israeli strategic long-term thinking
By RAY HANANIA
06/08/2010 JERUSALEM POST

At the rate it’s going, Israel will eventually help Hamas
become one of the most formidable political forces in the region.

Israel’s botched handling of the seizure of the Mavi Marmara seeking to break the Gaza blockade isn’t the first time a government in Israel has messed up. The Israelis actually have a long and consistent record of missing opportunities to avoid conflict.

Just look at the record of bad decisions.

In the 1970s, to avoid peace talks with the PLO and Yasser Arafat, Israel’s leaders developed a scheme to create an Islamic alternative. They provided support to the Islamic Association, headed by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, whom the Israelis killed in a targeted assassination in 2004.

That scheme allowed Yassin and his Gaza-based organization to launch Hamas in 1989 at the start of the first intifada. Although Israel did not “create” Hamas as some claim, Israel’s mess ups helped midwife Hamas.

Big mistake.

When Yasser Arafat’s peace partner, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered by an extremist Jew, instead of using the tragedy to undermine Israeli extremism, the government spiraled toward a policy of blaming the Palestinians for all peace failures. Voters responded by electing leaders who opposed Rabin’s peace vision, wrongly believing that a “tough” leader – I call it the Menachem Begin factor – would bring peace.

Instead of reinforcing peace, tough policies once again reinforced extremism and further weakened peace.

WHEN THE Israelis finally decided to consider returning lands seized in 1967, instead of making the right choice for peace, Israel’s “tough” leaders made the politically expedient choice, withdrawing their troops – and citizens – from Gaza in 2005 unilaterally.

Again, Israel’s policies strengthened Hamas and made it look like a hero to a people besieged by military occupation and frustrated by the start-and-stop failures of peace.

This was a mistake that crowned Hamas as the movement to defeat Israel’s 1967 occupation policies.

And just as these failed policies reinforced a slow and steady movement of Palestinians toward religious extremism and Hamas, it also created a growing intransigence among Israeli voters who, instead of voting for new, fresh or creative leadership, always voted instead to chose the “tough” leader. The one they hoped would beat down Palestinian nationalism and allow them to believe they could make peace with no substantive concessions on land.

When President Barack Obama spoke about the need to recognize the needs of “both sides” in a speech one year ago designed to reinforce moderation in the Arab and Muslim world, Israelis, seemingly unfamiliar with balanced arbiters, took the comments personally and did everything they could to undermine his policies using their political allies who control both houses of the US Congress.

And when Obama sought to kick-start the peace process by bringing Palestinians and Israelis from the battlefield to the negotiating table, Israel’s government (some of the same who were involved in the 1970s decision to support Yassin’s Islamic Association) couldn’t even stand up to the public pressure to freeze settlement expansion without damaging the “special relationship” with the US.

And now there is the disastrous naval response to the bunch of “activists” who might have sailed into distant memory but are now being hailed around the world as leaders of Middle East civil rights, deflecting attention from Hamas, highlighting the nature of Israel’s blockade against 1.5 million civilians and shattering the already precarious relations with its only real ally in the Middle East, Turkey.

If these policy decisions were intentionally designed to undermine peace and Israel’s standing in the world, I would call the tactics brilliant. But the truth is each and every failure is the result of government policy gone wrong, reinforced by an Israeli public that lives in denial.

At this rate, Israel will eventually help Hamas become one of the most dominant and formidable political forces in the region, the other being Hizbullah.

Of course, Israeli voters might wake up from their hallucinations about their future based on an iron-fist policy and withdraw completely from the West Bank to, for the first time, do something to support the only alternative to Hamas, the secular and anemic Palestinian Authority.

But then, that would require some strategic long-term thinking and that’s not something Israel has a good record of.

The writer is an award-winning Palestinian-American columnist. www.YallaPeace.com

Jerusalem Post/Yalla Peace: How about some compassion from the Jewish people for Palestinians

How about some compassion
By RAY HANANIA
06/04/2010 Jerusalem Post Column

Israel should start acting like the Jewish state it claims to be.

When I was young, I read all the horror stories of how the Jews were persecuted over the centuries – mainly by non-Arabs. I read about the tragedy of World War II and the Nazis, and what we now know as the Holocaust. My dad, who was born in Jerusalem, knew even better. As Palestinians, he and his brother fought during World War II to liberate Europe and end the Nazi persecution of Jews, and many others.

So I am not trying to make Israel stop being a Jewish state. In fact, I am trying to make it be a real Jewish state – a Jewish state with a conscience embracing the Jews’ history of suffering.

Why is it that suffering often does not bring compassion, but rather meanness? Yes, meanness. That’s the only way I can describe the way many Israelis and American Jews are acting.

How else do you describe what is taking place in the Gaza Strip, pushing people beyond frustration and despondency? And when they explode in violence, Israel strikes so powerfully, as if it believes that beating someone teaches them to obey. It doesn’t. It feeds more rebellion. But I fear many in the Israeli government know that; the violent reaction of Palestinians in Gaza is exactly what they want.

The best defense Israelis offer is that they do their “best” to minimize civilian casualties. Oh well, if many civilians die, it happens. That does not portray Israel’s “best” at all.

Collective punishment. Targeted killings. Land confiscations. Are these the principles of the Jewish people? I don’t think so.

THEN THERE is the peace process that the Israeli government insists Palestinians are stalling. Really? Since 1988, the Palestinians have formally accepted Israel’s “right to exist.”

But have Israelis recognized that Palestinians exist? Most do not, insisting there never was a Palestine or a Palestinian people.

With each step of the failed peace process, the Palestinians compromised and are now willing to accept what’s left: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and most of – not all of – east Jerusalem.

What’s Israel’s response? After the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, his successors fought hard to stop the compromises and reverse the peace process. They openly vowed they would not dismantle settlements. They would not share Jerusalem. They would not compensate Palestinian refugees.

If I were Jewish, I would be ashamed of myself. I would be ashamed of the conduct of my country established to give Jews a place where they could stand up as a people based on the rule of law, morality and principles of justice and compassion.

Israel keeps saying it acts to protect its citizens from “Arab terrorism,” but everything it does goes one step further. Israel builds settlements in the West Bank after it is captured in 1967, claiming they are merely security enclaves to prevent Palestinians from trying to attack the new state. And then these security sites become fast-growing settlements on land owned by Palestinians. And they expand, grabbing all the nearby resources. Wide areas are cleared so these settlers can not only have new homes but also enjoy a buffer zone and special roads... all on land that is not theirs.

Then it decides to build a wall with lookout towers and checkpoints. It is a concrete wall when it is near Palestinian populations, and a fence when it is near less-populated Palestinian farmlands.

Worse, instead of being built on the Green Line, it is built deep in the West Bank, and it snakes around the most precious commodity besides land – the water wells. Every one of them is now on the Israeli side.

AND WHILE Palestinians are struggling to keep the frustrations of a brutal occupation from making matters worse, Israel shrugs its shoulders. Sure we want peace, says Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But why should we stop expanding existing settlements?

Why? Maybe it might help make peace a reality? If that is really what Netanyahu wants. He long declared that he would not support two states. Now he does. Kind of.

In east Jerusalem, instead of trying to find ways to help both sides, Israel’s government is confiscating land and property and turning them over to Jews. When someone complains that this is “Judaization” of Jerusalem – something some Israelis openly claim – he or she is denounced as an anti-Semite.

Do I want to destroy Israel? No. I want Israel to start acting like the Jewish state it claims to be. Because right now, Israelis are not doing a good job of being Jews, Jews with compassion, Jews who believe in real peace. Jews who suffered so tragically that they know what it is like to have their land, homes and possessions taken.

I remember Jews leading the civil rights movement in America to fight for the rights of blacks, and who stand by silent as Arab citizens of Israel claim they are being discriminated against. No civil rights movement for them. I remember Jews leading the world with great discoveries. And I ask myself, where has it all gone?

Yes, I recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The real question, though, is when will Israelis start to recognize Israel as a Jewish state too?

Named Best Ethnic Columnist in America by New America Media, the writer is a Palestinian-American columnist and peace activist. He can be reached at www.YallaPeace.com

Ray Hanania interviewed by satire web site criticizing fanatics

Here's the link to Ray Hanania's interview on the satire site taking on extremists and fanatics in the American Arab community at "KabobFest."

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