Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had a somewhat less than stellar success in his controversial talks with the Hamas leadership in Damascus: Khaled Meshal did promise him that a new letter from abducted soldier Gilad Shalit will be forwarded to his family (a gesture that Shalit’s father described as insufficient), but there was little else Carter could point to in concrete terms—other than his repeated assertion, unsupported by fact, that Hamas had somehow moderated its view on the existence of Israel. The opposite is true—as was amply revealed by Mahmoud al-Zahar in his op-ed in the Washington Post. (Would they carry an op-ed by Ayman al-Zawahiri? Or is Hamas more “moderate” because they have so far confined themselves to slaughtering Jews?) The total Israeli withdrawal from every inch of 1967-acquired territory—including Jerusalem—is to him not the end, but the beginning of a process that would lead to the undoing of the “crime” of 1948: Israel’s creation. Meanwhile he sickeningly compares his murderous movement (ask Fatah activists in Gaza what life is like nowadays, if they have not yet been thrown off a tall building) to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising!
Such risible texts—which yet pale in comparison with what Hamas dishes out in Arabic to their own people and children, from Jew-eating rabbits to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—are but part of the pattern; suicidal terror is another; and there is now a systemic effort to deepen the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, attacking all crossing points and manipulating the energy supply—yet another illustration of the nature of the Hamas leadership. It should come as no surprise to Carter or to anyone else that an international boycott was imposed (although it does come as a welcome surprise to Israelis that the global front has held for so long, even in Europe, largely because Hamas’s positions did disappoint even those who reached out to them.)
But then again, in the cold and bitter light shed on Middle Eastern affairs by the sad story of Iraq, should we not be more attentive, if not to the moralizing tone of those who find fault only with Israel and the West (the so-called “racism of lower expectations” when it comes to the Arab side), then at least to the arguments of those who tell us we should swallow our qualms and speak with those who hold real power in places like Gaza, Damascus, or Tehran? Carter, after all, did mutter in Sderot that the rockets attacks on a civilian population are a crime, which did not prevent him from speaking to the perpetrators, so as to try to put a stop to their practices. Should he not be commended for trying to obtain peaceful days and nights for the children of the northern Negev, and their hapless neighbors across the border, even at the price of speaking to the unspeakable?
The answer is far from simple, and those who care for Israel’s future should weigh it carefully—bearing in mind that the day is yet far off when we might be surrounded in our corner of the world with smiling democrats of Scandinavian political countenance. (Even in peaceful Europe, old grievances still simmer, but at least they are no longer translated, in most cases, into death cults and celebrations of murder.) Some degree of what the newly sanitized political language here calls hasdara, “regularization” (or “coming to terms”) with the reality of Hamas rule in Gaza may be the unpleasant but preferable choice in the short and mid-term future, if only because the alternative, a large-scale invasion, could leave us holding the Gaza Strip again, with no one willing to take it off our hands, and the very purpose of the painful 2005 disengagement defeated by our own actions. There is, moreover, the equally unpleasant business of dealing for the life of Gilad Shalit, trading dozens, if not more, murderers for one young man—which again requires some form of dialogue and the work of go-betweens such as the head of Egyptian intelligence, General Omar Suleiman.
Why, then, did the Israeli political leadership—with the interesting exceptions of President Shimon Peres, former Meretz leader Yossi Beilin, and more surprisingly (until you consider the centrality of pidyon shevuyim, redeeming of captives, in the Rabbinic tradition) Shas leader Eli Yishai—shun Carter during his visit? The answer lies in the nature of what Hamas could have achieved if these meetings came to be seen as having Israel’s blessing. Carter, after all, is not a shadowy figure, operating in the dim twilight of intelligence work. Nations assign to their secret services those missions that are by definition not only dangerous and unpleasant, but often morally dubious and quite regularly illegal. This makes them useful envoys when the likes of Hamas need to be dealt with—so long as they stick to their side of the line and do not blur it.
This was the case, some years ago, with Alistair Crooke, an experienced operator of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, assigned by the EU to help lower the level of Israeli-Palestinian violence. I came to know him well, and I readily concede that many on both sides are alive today due to his efforts. The relevant Israelis, moreover, were quite well aware of what he was doing and why. But once the thrust of his work turned him into an open advocate for the political legitimization of his Hamas interlocutors, he crossed that thin line that separates the necessary evil from the unnecessary elevation of evil-doers, and he was recalled by his government.
This is why a cloud of moral doubt has attached itself to Carter’s mission. He is not, by any remove, a secret agent. He is very much a man with a moral mission. He speaks with the authority of a former president, a peacemaker (although his proudest achievement, the peace between Israel and Egypt, was, in fact the result of Anwar Sadat’s angry and impulsive reaction to Carter’s bid to conclude a regional deal with the Soviets), and a force for good in world affairs. When he lent his moral standing to the bid to legitimize Hamas, before they ever did anything to prove that they have left behind the practices and preferences that have made them what they are today, he did a disservice to humanity—in much the same way as he did in 1994, when he facilitated what turned out to be a fraudulent “deal” with one of the foulest regimes in human history, Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship in North Korea.
A tahdi’a—a calming down, a temporary ceasefire—deal with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, may yet occur. Israel is not eager to launch another Operation “Defensive Shield” as in 2002, this time in Gaza. If the Egyptians do improve their capacity to prevent large-scale weapons smuggling, a long waiting period may not be quite as dangerous as some warn us it might be. (The Hamas military forces, a small army trained by Iran, will use such a period to prepare for battle, but so would the IDF, probably to better effect.) As for the Hamas leadership, it faces a Gazan population rather more frightened and rattled by recent events than their brave public rhetoric suggests. They, too, could do with a respite. But a deep chasm should continue to separate such a practical “regularization” from the act of political “legitimization” of a movement that rests on genocidal premises and stands guilty of multiple acts of mass murder. |
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