Custer ≠ Sitting Bull

By: John Caruso

This article by Glenn Greenwald is generally good, with one glaring exception:

What we find here is that the extremes on both sides of every conflict eventually come to mirror one another perfectly. Israelis settlers and Hamas have an equal desire to prevent a peace agreement and for the same reasons.

The notion that Hamas wants to prevent a peace agreement is certainly received wisdom in the U.S., but it's also completely false.  Here's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh:

In a rare public appearance, the leader of the Hamas authority in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said the organisation was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the borders that existed before the 1967 war. [...] "If there is a real plan to resolve the Palestinian question on the basis of the creation of a Palestinian state within the borders of June 4, 1967, and with full sovereignty, we are in favour of it."

Haniyeh said this 6 months after the Israeli attack on Gaza, and he was repeating the same things he'd said well before the attack as well.  And here's Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal:

"There is a position and program that all Palestinians share," he tells NEWSWEEK. "To accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital. With the right of return. And this state would have real sovereignty, on the land and on the borders. And with no settlements."

So Hamas's position is exactly in line with the rest of the civilized world, and the opposition to a peace agreement based on the 1967 borders comes—as it always has—from Israel and the United States.

But the notion that Hamas wants to prevent peace "for the same reasons" as Israeli settlers isn't just factually wrong but fundamentally misguided as well.  Israeli settlers (and the Israeli political establishment generally) want to prevent peace because they know any real peace agreement will mean they'll have to stop stealing Palestinian land, whereas Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups want to keep them from stealing any more of it.  Even if we were to ignore the facts and accept for the sake of argument that Hamas wants to prevent peace, it's not as though Hamas members are flying from Gaza to establish settlements and set up military checkpoints in Brooklyn.

So not only is there no parity between these two positions, it's impossible for there to be parity between them.  Even the most strident and rejectionist member of Hamas would have a more coherent moral justification for his position than an Israeli settler, and you can no more reasonably equate their motivations than you can compare the Sioux to the European colonists who drove them from the land.

AND ALSO: No discussion of Hamas and peace would be complete without this background:

[B]eginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies. [...] "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

So whenever you hear an Israeli official bemoaning the lack of a "partner for peace" or claiming that Hamas can't be bargained with, never forget the unspoken clause: exactly as we intended.  In fact the Israeli assault on Gaza in December of 2008 was in large part an attempt to reverse Hamas's acceptance of peace and willingness to pursue change through elections rather than force, but—as the quotes from Haniyeh and Meshaal show—it failed in this way just as it failed in so many others.

— John Caruso