posted September 29, 2006 01:25 AM              

By TONY KARON

Time
26 September 2006
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1539653,00.
html

Viewpoint: The West is betting that continued Palestinian
misery will force Hamas leaders to recognize Israel. But
the strategy is as misguided as it is cruel

Palestinian Muslims are currently joining the faithful the
world over in denying themselves food between sunrise and
sundown. But while most Muslims elsewhere break their
Ramadan fast with sumptuous iftar meals, those unfortunate
enough to live in the West Bank and Gaza are finding that
they have less and less to put on the table come
nightfall. That's because they remain under a financial
siege imposed by Israel, the U.S. and Europe, in the hope
of forcing Hamas, the Palestinian ruling party, to
recognize Israel. The premise of the siege strategy
appears to be that by increasing Palestinian misery,
domestic pressure will mount on Hamas to submit or quit.

But such collective punishment may be as misguided as it
is cruel; even if it did work, any "recognition" achieved
this way would mean little in the pursuit of peace. An
authoritative Palestinian polling organization last week
released telling findings on Palestinian public opinion in
the West Bank and Gaza. It found 54% of voters
dissatisfied with Hamas's performance in government, the
figure rising to 69% when it came to financial matters
such as payment of salaries. Only 38% would vote for Hamas
in an election now. But when asked whether Hamas should
submit to the Western demand that it recognize Israel, 67%
said no.

Clearly, it's not simply some extreme Islamist fringe that
favors withholding recognition -- it's a majority
consensus that includes many of the voters of President
Mahmoud Abbas's own Fatah party. In part, as Israeli
commentator Danny Rubinstein notes, that reflects a widely
held belief among Palestinians that "Yasser Arafat and the
PLO recognized the State of Israel in the Oslo agreement
and what did they gain from that? Only suffering and
misfortune." In fact, as Rubinstein notes, the settler
population in the West Bank actually doubled during the
Oslo years.

Even the Arab League proposal that Abbas is demanding
Hamas accept as the basis for a unity government offers
only conditional recognition -- the Arab states would
normalize relations with Israel if it agrees to withdraw
to its 1967 borders. Hamas likes to dodge the issue by
pointing out that Israel has no intention of doing that.

The question of recognizing Israel is difficult for Hamas
or any other Palestinian organization, ultimately, because
of the meaning of Israel in the Palestinian national
story. In the Western and Israeli narrative, Israel's
creation is seen as redress for centuries of Jewish
suffering in Europe culminating in the Holocaust. In the
Palestinian and Arab narrative, Israel's creation meant
the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of
people from their homes and another Arab humiliation at
Western hands. So, while May 15 is celebrated by Israelis
as Yom Haatzmaut (independence day), the Palestinians mark
the same day as the somber anniversary of Al-Nakbah (the
catastrophe), the moment when hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians lost everything.

The idea of the triumph of one people being the tragedy of
another is eloquently captured in Sandy Tolan's book, The
Lemon Tree -- essential reading for anyone seeking to
understand the difficulty in resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tolan chronicles the true
story of Dalia Eshkenazi, whose family flees
post-Holocaust Bulgaria in 1948 to live the Zionist dream
of building a Jewish state in the Holy Land. The new
Israeli government provides them with an abandoned Arab
house in the town of Ramla, in which she grows up. One
summer morning in 1967, she's sitting in the garden near
the old lemon tree, when Bashir Khairi knocks on the gate.
Khairi is the son of the man who planted the lemon tree;
he was born in the house and lived there until age 4, when
he and his family, and hundreds of others, were forced
onto buses by Israeli soldiers and driven to the West
Bank, where they have lived as refugees ever since. The
fraught and complex friendship that ensues between Dalia
-- a committed Zionist who wants justice for the
Palestinians -- and Bashir, a Palestinian militant who
insists on his right of return to his home, allows for a
rare frank dialogue based on mutual respect and an honest
acknowledgment of the past, and of the difficulty of
resolving the present. There's no happy ending or
resolution, but their mutual recognition offers some sort
of hope.

It's the clash of narratives described by Tolan that
ultimately fuels the controversy over Hamas recognizing
Israel. Hamas's dramatic election victory came precisely
because the Palestinian electorate judged Fatah to have
failed. To simply demand, as Israel and the Western powers
are doing, that Hamas now echo Fatah's symbolic
recognition of Israel and renunciation of violence is
pointless. Fatah recognized the State of Israel only
because it had become clear to them that Israel was an
irreversible historical fact. But that certainly did not
stop Fatah's rank and file from taking up arms during the
intifada that began in September 2000. Ask Mahmoud Abbas
or any other moderate Palestinian leader whether they
would rather Israel had not come into being in 1948, and
there can be no doubt of the honest answer.

posted December 31, 2006 02:34 AM              

He gets real angry sometimes but controls himself after.

posted December 31, 2006 01:00 PM              

Lady I have a life. Did you think I was actually gonna camp out here all night and have no life like you?

Hell no.