| Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
ANOTHER HAMAS PEACE PLAN IGNORED
If you want to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell, just look at the New York Times editorial pages of November 1, 2006. Amazingly enough, the Times ran a full op-ed column by a top official of the Hamas party, Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Yousef repeated the same offer Hamas has been making for years. In Arabic it’s called a “hudna.”
As Yousef explained, a hudna is “a period of nonwar but only partial resolution of a conflict.” It “extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences.” A hudna “affords the opportunity to humanize one’s opponents and understand their position with the goal of resolving the intertribal or international dispute.”
“This offer of hudna is no ruse, as some assert, to strengthen our military machine,” Yousef pleaded. And he offered several reasons to believe it: “A hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. … It goes back to the Koran itself. … When Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God and will therefore keep its word. Hamas has honored its previous cease-fires, as Israelis grudgingly note with the oft-heard words, ‘At least with Hamas they mean what they say.’”
But what do they say and mean? In
To offset its radical move of
giving op-ed space to Hamas, the Times published, on
the very same day, a letter from the rising star of
At the other end
of
So the Times gave
space to both ends of the political spectrum. That seems balanced. But the next
day, in its letters column, the Times ran four letters in response. Though one
applauded the Hamas offered, three denounced it,
following Lieberman’s lead, as bald-faced lying propaganda from a group
dedicated to destroying
For those who think actions speak
louder than words, the Times also ran a news story about a major Israeli
assault on
For now, the Israeli cabinet has decided to hold off on harsher treatment, sticking to the present course, which has killed some 250 Gazans in the last four months (while losing only three of their own soldiers). But they can count on the present course scuttling any chance for hudna and peace talks.
This whole scenario has been played
out before. Back in June Hamas leaders offered a hudna. On the same day, the Israelis began the renewed
military action in
Indeed, the Hamas leaders have had to trim back their offer. In June, they offered a hudna that would automatically be renewed for an indefinite time. Now they are limiting it to 10 years. But in Middle Eastern politics, 10 years is close to an eternity.
And Hamas leaders cannot say publicly the most important fact:
In Muslim law, a hudna is offered only to a
non-Muslim party that controls its own non-Muslim land. In other words (as I
have noted in a previous column) by using the word “hudna,”
Hamas leaders are implicitly recognizing the
permanent existence of
As Yousef told the British newspaper, The Guardian, Hamas leaders can’t say that publicly because “there is no support in Gaza and the West Bank for recognition of Israel, and he could not propose such a change at present. ‘If I did, I would end up like Michael Collins,’ he said, referring to the Irish republican leader assassinated in 1922 for accepting an Irish two-state solution. ‘We need to change people's minds on how they look at the conflict, and it will take time. The climate will change if we have a period of peace.’"
But right-wing Israelis, who get most of the space in the Times’ letters to the editor, simply won’t believe that. They won’t recognize the risk that Hamas leaders are taking by getting ahead of their own public on the path to peace. They would rather hold on to their unshakable faith that Jews are surrounded by anti-semitic enemies bent only on destroying them.
Sadly, opinion polls show that fear-based right-wing view growing among Israeli Jews. They would rather hold on to their self-image as helpless victims than take any meaningful step toward peace.
And the Israeli
public relations machinery is working as effectively as ever to shape
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