For all those folks who think that Hamas can be negotiated with, here's why they are full of shit. These are extremist Islamic fundamentalists whose goal is to drive all non-Muslims out of the Middle East. The cannot be negotiated with or reasoned with. They can only be dealt with at the point of a gun.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668651761&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Posted by SLC | May 16, 2008 8:34 AM

Perhaps its just me, but I smell whiffs of Ocean Hill Brownsville, circa 1968 around me. Whiffs of Jessie Jackson's speech on the Middle East at the 1972 convention, and the Committee on the Present Danger, and the Team B, fixations that emanated, indirectly, from the first two events mentioned above.

Sure hope we don't see a rerun of this dynamic in 2008 but I have my fears.

Posted by jonst | May 16, 2008 8:40 AM

The Jerusalem Post article you link to doesn't charge Hamas with any connection to the bombing and says it appears to be the work of a poorly trained individual. Try again, jackass.

Posted by William Burns | May 16, 2008 8:41 AM

Unfortunately for Americans, Pres. Bush, McCain and the Republicans prefer to speak in half-truths and distortions of the truth, preferring not to find pertinent answers or solutions to the issues facing us today, one example the Real Threat of Global Warming! They think finger-pointing and speaking in a loud voice will deflect the attention away from their failing policies -- that we will forget that they fooled us before. The Republicans will promise and say and anything to stay in power although their conservative polcies do noting to help the American people at large. Gas prices are higher than ever before, as is food (they won't even support the farmers and food is a necessary element for life), we have erroding schools, bridges and roads, jobs which go overseas or job closings, billions of dollars going to a war which should have never been waged and those dollars do nothing to help the Iraqi people who are still suffering and have very little electricity and adequate sewer facilities or the use of their own oil. We have record number of home foreclosures, medical bills which are going through the roof and thousands of people who have no health insurance at all. Every year Democratic Senators and Congressman have to fight to even get a decent minimum wage for American workers while Republicans continually give theirselves an annual wage hike, yet it is the American people who hire them to work for people and not the corporations they bail out time and time again. They pretend to be the Party of Family Values when they are really the party of special interest groups, corporations and greed! They care nothing for suffering families -- college tuition has never been so high, barring thousands of young people from attaining a higher education and achieving the American dream. Their tax code, again, benefits the wealthy and leaves out the American family. They call themselves conservatives which is a nice way of saying they are selfish and like to conserve the wealth for themselves! They make fun of the word "liberalism" like it is a dirty word when we all know liberal means to give amply and generously, something they want not to happen preferring to keep all the wealth and goodtimes for themselves and their corporate buddies. They devise wars which only weaken the fabric of our society by shell-shocked veterans weakened physically and mentally and children who have to grow up without their fathers or mothers because they are either overseas fighting a war or have died in a war when diplomacy would have been the greater action to take. These same veterans if they are lucky to come home have deplorable hospitals to come home to and a battle to get their benefits. If they suffer from mental disease they are often found homeless, as we have shut down the majority of our mental hospitals accross the United States... and yet Republicans continue to fool us that they are the Party of Family Values. They fooled us with WMD's and took us off on a path of delusion by fighting terrorism in Iraq when it was oil they were after! Bin Laden is still at large. We cannot believe anything they say... Let us not be fooled again!

Posted by Angellight | May 16, 2008 8:43 AM

You think it's hard to decipher Obama's position on Israel? Try taking a crack at McCain's. 2 years ago, he supported negotiating with Hamas. Now, he doesn't want to negotiate with anyone. What's going on there?

Posted by Mike | May 16, 2008 9:13 AM

Obama's ambiguity will be hard to maintin, but I think his current strategy - of being ultra-pro-Israel without being anti-Palestine, is pretty smart.

But it's a demogougic environment -- suppose Mccain does the traditional (and predictable) pander and committs to moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. What's Obama going to say?

Posted by Ikram | May 16, 2008 9:41 AM

The sovereign wealth funds of the various Arab countries are going to be dictating US policy towards Israel in the near future anyway.

So it really doesn't matter what Obama, McCain, or the general public thinks on this matter.

Posted by McGruff | May 16, 2008 9:43 AM

Re William Burns

Fucktard Mr. William Burns, as usual, misses the point. The fact is that this is only one in a series of such attacks which, if not encouraged by the Hamas terrorist government, is tolerated by them. The fact is that the Christian minority in the Gaza Strip, like the Christian minority in Bethlehem, is an endangered species. Does Mr. Burns not remember the attempt of an Islamist group to build a mosque in the parking lot in front of the Church of the Nativity a few hears ago, which was nothing but an attempt to drive Christians out of that city?

Posted by SLC | May 16, 2008 9:48 AM

Thanks for that link to South Jerusalem. It will be great to have access to some progressive Israeli thought because, God knows, we sure don't get that side of the story here in the U.S.

As always, great job on the blog. I've got to go buy my copy of HITS.

Posted by lone star liberal | May 16, 2008 9:59 AM

Thanks for that link to South Jerusalem. It will be great to have access to some progressive Israeli thought because, God knows, we sure don't get that side of the story here in the U.S.

As always, great job on the blog. I've got to go buy my copy of HITS.

Posted by lone star liberal | May 16, 2008 10:00 AM

the divide between the hawk and dove camps is, at this point, actually quite a bit narrower than it's historically been.

This is because groups like AIPAC have usurped control over the terms of debate on Israel, enforcing an orthodoxy that calls the slightest critique of Israeli policy anti-semitic. This has the effect of narrowing the "acceptable" terms of debate (and essentially marginalizing any true "dove" voices).

Posted by McKingford | May 16, 2008 10:15 AM

It is sadly ironic how actual Israelis, the very people whose lives would be affected by such decisions, are easily ignored while Bill Kristol, who isn't even representative of American Jews, gets treated like he's an expert on Israel because he likes killing Arabs and Muslims.

Posted by Reality Man | May 16, 2008 10:18 AM

If you want to talk "hearing what they want to hear", that would be people like you, Matt, who seem to think that Hamas might be reasonable, if only we talked to them. You might want to head on over to memri.org and peruse what Hamas says before you get the idea that they could be effectively talked to.

Posted by James Robertson | May 16, 2008 10:39 AM

I support Obama, but I have no illusions about what he's going to be able to accomplish in regard to the Israel-Palestinian situation, or will even try to accomplish. He will certainly not go as far as Jimmy Carter or George Bush 41 did, let alone defy the Israelis as Eisenhower once did. At most, he'll very gently push the Israelis to negotiate with some minimal good faith with the PNA, and open up some back-channels to Hamas. Nothing fundamental is going to change until the Israelis themselves elect a real peace Prime Minister -- not a total fraud like Ehud Barak or coward like Shimon Peres, but someone like Rabin who appears to have been ready to make a real deal, and who had the political cred to make it stick. But everything I've read suggests the Israelis are turning even more hard right and may bring back Natan-yahoo.

Posted by Egypt Steve | May 16, 2008 11:06 AM

Please explain how to achieve "real peace" with a group whose stated and public goal is the annihilation of Israel? They are currently lobbing rockets into civilian areas (Sderot, Ashkelon). What can a real "peace prime minister" achieve with that?

Posted by James Robertson | May 16, 2008 11:22 AM

If you seriously want to know, my personal suggestion is to evacuate Iraq, and spend the $500 billion we would spend staying there 'til at least 2013 (the McCain plan) to permanently solve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

First, spend $100 billion to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. Right now, the UN estimates about 4,250,000 Palestinian refugees, some some internally displaced in Palestine itself, but most living abroad. With $100 billion, we could pay each of them about $23,000 to irrevocably give up any claim to properties lost in 1948 and relocate outside of Israel. For a family of five, that is a tidy $115,000 -- not a lot, perhaps, but enough to make a new start just about anywhere in the world, and actually enough to live pretty damn large in a lot of the Middle East. But we've got serious money to burn, so let's double it.

$200 billion down, $300 billion to go. We're going to have to give the Israelis something like same deal, to relocate their settlers within the Green Line (or at least within those pesky "border adjustments" that the Palestinians are going to have to swallow). Now we can make this pretty sweet for the Israelis without breaking the bank. There are around 400,000 settlers in the occupied territories, and many of them will not have to relocate, since the final deal will undoubtedly incorporate the "major settlement blocks" into Israel. But if half of them have to be compensated, and we drop $50 billion, then that breaks down to $250,000 per settler, or $1.25 million per family of five. Which should soften the blow a teense. To get this bonus, the Israelis just have to agree to negotiate a good-faith border, and then completely renounce any claim or security interest in any territory beyond that border. Unfair to the Palestinians? Well, let's face it: the political market has long-since decreed that Israeli lives are worth far more than Palestinian lives. We'll have to be realistic about this.

OK, we're down to $250 billion. It's going fast, but what else could we do with our money? How about an extra $50 billion to be placed in an endowment fund, split between the Palestinian state and Israel for economic development (especially for Palestine) and security enhancements (mainly for Israel)?

$200 billion to go. What next? Well, we'll have to sweeten the deal for the rest of the Arabs. We'll want them all to make peace with Israel, and to integrate into their societies -- with full citizenship rights -- the Palestinians who do not settle in the new Palestinian State. Not only that -- we'll want to start laying the groundwork for a well-educated, progressive, pro- (or at least, not anti-) American future throughout the region.

The two best things we've got going for us in the Middle East right now are the American Universities in Cairo and in Beirut. No better forces for Americanization and modernization going. These are where the elite meet to eat -- eat McDonalds, son. But elsewhere in the Arab world, universities are under-funded, decrepit, crowded, third or fourth rate - hotbeds of rage, alienation and mediocrity. So here's a thought: with our next $100 billion, why don't we build a few more American universities! Good ones. How good? Well, MIT has an endowment of about $7 billion. Why don't we establish 10 new universities in the Middle East, each with an endowment the size of the MIT's, and give each of them an additional $3 billion for start-up costs? What the fuck, let's call 'em all "George Bush University in (respectively) Jerusalem, Jericho, Damascus, Amman, Tripoli, Tangier, Tunis, Kuwait City, Khartum and (how's this for thinking outside the box?) Teheran."

Gee, having pretty much solved the Arab-Israeli crisis, having laid the groundwork for a bright future for the youth of the Arab world, and taken a pretty good stab at reconciliation with Iran to boot, we've actually got $100 billion left. Maybe we'll want to return that to the American taxpayer, to, I don't know, pay for the damage caused by Hurrican Katrina. Or something like that. Or, maybe we could do something like this -- create an additional $100 billion fund for the broader Middle East for primary education, infrastructure improvements, economic development. Let's tie grants from the fund to to measurable progress in the creation of civil society. Not necessarily elections, though that would be nice -- but governmental transparency, especially in accounting for all expenditures under the program; progress in freeing the press; women's rights; freedom of assembly and association; and etc. Things that, over time, will lead to open, prosperous, democratic societies.

Posted by Egypt Steve | May 16, 2008 11:50 AM

Re Egypt Steve

What Mr. Egypt Steve is proposing is the 1979 James Earl Carter strategy, namely bribe the contending parties, Egypt and Israel, into behaving themselves. The problem is that it assumes that Hamas is bribeable. Unfortunately, I think that this is where Mr. Egypt Steves' approach is going to founder. I don't think that Hamas can be bribed. I think that their demand that the State of Israel go out of business is, to them, non-negotiable and I don't think that any amount of money will change their course.

Posted by SLC | May 16, 2008 12:05 PM

Sigh. If all this takes is money, please explain why the extremely rich Arab states - like, say, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - haven't done so already?

Here's the short answer for the slower learners: It's not a problem money can solve.

Trying to pay off the radicals would have been like paying Napolean in 1811. You end up poorer afterwards, and still at war.

Posted by James Robertson | May 16, 2008 12:07 PM

Hamas is not a unity, any more than any other of the "players" we're talking about are. Some of them are fanatics. Some of them are criminals. Some of them care about their country and their people. And the vast majority of the Palestinians are not, or even supporters of Hamas.

Where this is actually going to founder is in Israel, at least as long as Israel keeps voting in the Likud or any other right-wing party. It's pretty clear that the Israeli right cares more about keeping the West Bank than it does about peace. In this view, Israelis who are blown up by terrorists are dieing for their country, and for the integrity of Eretz Israel. It's the same mentality that led David Ben Gurion to say that if all of the Jewish children of Europe could be saved from the Nazis by going to Britain, or if only half of them could be saved by going to Palestine, he'd choose the latter option. Because to a hard-core Zionist, the individual Jew is meaningless as the individual Muslim is to the hard-core Islamist. What counts is the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

This is why I said the change has to come from Israel itself. A real "peace" prime minister can't change things by himself, but if such a person were elected, it would mean a fundamental change on the part of the Israelis -- a readiness to reverse ethnic cleansing and "separation" (can't say Apartheid!!!) and finally let the Palestinians have their lives back.

Posted by Egypt Steve | May 16, 2008 12:15 PM

Well, there's bribes, and then there's bribes. There's money, and then there's real money. Nothing has been attempted on the scale I'm suggesting, by multiple orders of magnitude. That's potentially a qualitative difference between my plan and anything that's been tried before.

But if you get past the dollar amounts, what I'm really talking about is ending the injustice of the occupation, and trying to make it palatable to the parties concerned. I'd like to point out, by the way, that this is the basis of the American tort system, and on the whole it works ok to keep society lubricated, even in the face of extremely serious and bitter disputes of all kinds.

As to why the Saudis or other Arabs haven't stepped up in this way? Who knows or cares? I'm the last to suggest that the Arab states have been any more responsible or intelligent in the last 60 years than anyone else. In fact I do not hesitate to say that Arab political culture is far less mature and reasonable than ours ... OK with that?

But I repeat that my main point is: the Palestinians have been treated unjustly by Israel and by the world community for a century. They were the victims of invasion and ethnic cleansing. Many Palestinians have committed grotesque crimes in their struggle against Israel, but even the worst crimes, in a just cause, don't ipso facto negate the basic justice of the cause (see Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). The fundamental original sin has to be expiated before there will be peace. It's in the Israelis' interest to concede that point and act on it seriously.

Posted by Egypt Steve | May 16, 2008 12:26 PM

People who are opposed to talking with Hamas miss several things:

1. "Talking" does not mean "negotiating." It means talking. In fact part of talking might be telling someone that they are talking nonsense.
2. "Talking" to someone does not suggest that one thinks the other person is reasonable much less "nice."
3. One talks to someone for one's own benefit — to gain information. The USA would have been better off had we been talking to Saddam Hussein's Iraq as we might have learned that it had no WMD.

Remember what the Godfather said: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

Posted by David Sucher | May 16, 2008 12:52 PM

There have been numerous talks of the nature you mention over the years. Other than the starry eyed dreamers (Matt), there's nothing to be gained in trying to have more direct talks with Hamas. They have a simple goal: eradicate Israel. As was mentioned above, they really aren't bribeable. The only likely way they are going to be forced to rethink their position is overwhelming force. I don't see that happening either, so in the short term, we'll see more of what we've had over the last decade or so.

Long term, I expect a replay of what happened to the Latin kingdoms in the area in the 12th century. Eventually, a modern Saladin will rise up, unify the fractious Arab states for a short period, and destroy Israel. After that, they'll go back to killing each other, leaving the left baffled as to why the disappearance of Israel didn't stop the fighting.

Posted by James Robertson | May 16, 2008 2:10 PM

I would suggest that to find out what Obama might do that you look into the views on Israel of Obama's finance chair Penny Pritzker and her friends. I don't know what they are, but that would seem like the obvious place to start.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the new public knowledge of Obama's 20 years of ties to Rev. Wright, and Wright's long-term ties to Minister Farrakhan, means that Obama would be very constrained in doing anything that could be construed as anti-Israeli. A black candidate from a more politically mainstream background would have more options, but Obama will be called upon to prove his pro-Israel bona fides over and over again. Recall that in his much praised (but mendacious) speech about how he could never disown Rev. Wright, Obama inserted an out-of-context shout-out to Israel. You'll see more of that.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 16, 2008 2:54 PM

By the way, I suspect Obama would be attracted to militarily attacking Sudan over Darfur, as his advisers Susan E. Rice and Anthony Lake advised in 2006 (and they wanted the U.S. to go ahead even without UN approval -- I guess they didn't read an early draft of "Heads in the Sand"):

Look at the advantages politically:

- It would show he's tough enough to kill people

- He would be killing Arabs, which would please the Marty Peretz crowd, and lay to rest all those associations with Farrakhan.

- But the Arabs being killed aren't very closely related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there is some important plausible deniability.

- It would please the Stuff White People Like crowd who have adopted Darfur as the Tibet of the 2000s.

- It would show the military industrial complex that he's going to dream up wars for them

- It would show the Game of Nations crowd that he's fighting for America's interests in the strategic conflict with China over access to ... uh, arid grazing land in the absolute middle of nowhere.

What's not to like about such a splendid little war?

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 16, 2008 3:15 PM

I have posted an article On Zionism whose final section looks at Barack Obama's Israel policy, concluding that friends of Israel ...

Posted by Chris Dornan | May 16, 2008 8:10 PM

I don't think that Hamas can be bribed. I think that their demand that the State of Israel go out of business is, to them, non-negotiable and I don't think that any amount of money will change their course.

I think the history of pretty much every state/organization that's made such a claim over the last 40 years would suggest otherwise. But maybe Hamas are the ones who really mean it...

As an aside, this is why we on the left aren't exactly defecating in our drawers every time someone like Ahmadenijad makes some destroy Israel crack. It seems to us as less of an actual threat and more of incendiary rhetoric designed to fire up the base, and distract from domestic troubles.

Which isn't to say such threats might not one day be carried out. But context, please.

Posted by scythia | May 16, 2008 8:23 PM

Robertson: "might want to head on over to memri.org and peruse what Hamas says"

That would be the MEMRI that's run by the ex-Mossad officer, right?

Moron.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 16, 2008 8:51 PM

Let me fix Robertson's last post:

There have been numerous talks of the nature you mention over the years. Other than the starry eyed dreamers (Matt), there's nothing to be gained in trying to have more direct talks with Israel. They have a simple goal: eradicate Palestinians. As was mentioned above, they really aren't bribeable. The only likely way they are going to be forced to rethink their position is overwhelming force. I don't see that happening either, so in the short term, we'll see more of what we've had over the last decade or so.

Long term, I expect a replay of what happened to the Latin kingdoms in the area in the 12th century. Eventually, a modern Saladin will rise up, unify the fractious Arab states for a short period, and destroy Israel [Note: by stealing Israel's own nuclear weapons, the obvious tactic]. After that, they'll go back to killing each other, leaving the left baffled as to why the disappearance of Israel didn't stop the fighting.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 16, 2008 8:57 PM