After a week of everyone smiling, President Bush bragging that he was able to do what no other administration was able to do, will come the first announcements. Hamas and Fatah begin talks to reunite. Soon they will be wearing togas in Mecca again and there will be a peace between Hamas and Fatah. Eventually when Hamas is controlling the new Palestinian Government, will come the return to terrorism that will degenerate into a two front war between the new Palestinian state and the new Israel with indefensible borders.
Crazy you say.....well its already beginning to happen check out this story from today's Front Page:
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/21/2007Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni keep shilling for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayad, and Fatah, and keep trying to get others to quarantine Hamas. The first part is not difficult—hardly anyone objects to praising, funding, and arming the latest iconic [I do-Sammy] “Palestinian moderates.” But the Hamas part has been harder—and now it’s Abbas himself who’s calling to let them back into the game.
After a meeting in Ramallah on Wednesday with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, Abbas called on Hamas to “return to national unity” and said: “The split that happened [between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip] as a result of Hamas’s coup is temporary and will be removed. The Palestinian people are opposed to this separation because we want a united and independent Palestinian state.”
Olmert’s office responded by warning that any such rapprochement would derail Israel’s latest “diplomatic process” with the Abbas-led PA. Expect Abbas to continue his brinkmanship of raking in the Western largesse while cooing toward his Hamas brethren. Expect Olmert and Livni, despite occasional mutterings, to keep coming back for more punishment.
By any rational reckoning, Abbas’s ongoing openness to Hamas should not come as a surprise. It doesn’t require an excursus into ancient history to recall that just last February in Mecca he signed a unity agreement with Hamas (to the apparent bewilderment of Condi Rice)—and would at this very moment still be contentedly serving as a junior partner in a Hamas-led government if it weren’t for Hamas’s coup in Gaza two months ago.
By the expectations of Western minds perhaps influenced by hour-long TV dramas in which the good ones triumph and everyone sees the light by the end, Abbas should have reacted to that setback by—egged on by Olmert’s inducement of freeing or pardoning hundreds of his Fatah terrorists—forever forswearing the evil Hamas.
Such inexcusably simplistic, black-and-white, Hamas vs. Fatah dualism ignores the fact that the two terror organizations have been closely interacting and cooperating since the onset of the Oslo era fourteen years ago. That it is a complex, troubled relationship no doubt containing elements of bitter conflict and rivalry does not cancel the fact that these two Arab-Muslim-Palestinian organizations with their common, codified goal of eradicating Israel feel much closer to each other than to their Western suitors.
But for Olmert and Livni—formerly right-wing Israelis who have collapsed before world pressures and substituted Palestinian aspirations for Israeli ones—no amount of punishment is enough. So earlier this week these two, in meetings with a delegation of U.S. Democratic congressmen who were visiting Israel, deflected any annoyance at the PA for paying the salaries of thousands of Hamas gunmen in Gaza last week, upholding Fayad’s claim that it was all a “clerical bureaucratic mistake.”
Indeed, Olmert and Livni cannot even wait for the planned regional conference later this year and are already pushing the Palestinian state’s “economic horizon,” Livni having canvassed a group of European foreign ministers and other officials to support infrastructure projects in the West Bank and Gaza including a “peace valley” in Jericho.
The ever-earnest Livni knows her work is cut out for her in trying to get Europe just to back the ostensible Fatah good guys and not warm up to Hamas as well.
Israeli diplomatic officials admit that “in nearly every country in Europe there [are] growing voices—whether in the parliament, the foreign ministries, or the media—for engagement with Hamas.” This week Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee already openly called for talks with the Gaza-based group.
But Prodi or a British parliamentary committee is one thing; for Abbas and Fayad themselves to display a warming trend toward Hamas should seemingly be deeply troubling to Israel’s determined duo. Also on Wednesday,
in another sign of rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah, the Fatah-controlled PA security forces in Bethlehem released nine Hamas members . . . who were arrested last month on suspicion of trying to establish an armed Hamas group in the West Bank. . . . a lawyer representing the Hamas detainees said a PA court ordered their release, and that the court’s decision was endorsed by PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad.
Ask why, amid its leaders’ inane, sunny talk of peace and horizons, Israel faces a reality of a drastically deteriorated security environment with terrorist and Syrian forces gaining power and confidence by the day, and surely part of the answer is that the Palestinianist virus has migrated southward from Europe and infected part of Israel’s populace and particularly its leaders. Olmert and Livni appear to be near-terminal cases who could still be woken up only by something very terrible.
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