reconciliation.
Palestinian reconciliation is an opportunity for Israel
Jerusalem chooses to see the unity deal as a threat, even after it long argued that Abbas doesn't represent the entire Palestinian people.
By Barak Ravid | Apr. 24, 2014 |
Mere minutes after first reports of a breakthrough in the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation talks on ending a seven-year rift began to emerge, the prime minister’s bureau launched a broadside attack on the development on all fronts. Talking points were distributed to the ministers, reporters’ phones bombarded with text messages, and fire and brimstone began pouring from the prime minister’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Arabic media liaison, Ofir Gendelman, has surpassed himself and issued tweets with fiery declarations that wouldn’t have embarrassed the Friday sermons delivered by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in one of Gaza’s mosques. In one of his tweets, Gendelman wrote in Arabic that Israel could “crush” both Fatah and Hamas, if only it so chose.
The belligerence of Netanyahu and his people was expected. It was another Pavlovian response of the Israeli government to the changes happening in the Middle East. As with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Hassan Rohani’s election victory in Iran or the interim agreement between the world powers and Tehran on the latter’s nuclear program, Israel’s response once again was negative, broadcast panic, and related any change of the status quo as a threat, rather than an opportunity.
The Israeli government response was not only expected, it was hypocritical. For the five years in which Netanyahu has been sitting in the premier's chair, he has negotiated with Hamas for more time, with more seriousness and with far more good will than with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. For those who have forgotten, Netanyahu reached at least two written agreements with the Gaza terror group; one in the 2011 deal in return for the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and the second confirming the cease-fire that ended Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012.
Netanyahu, who squeezed Abbas hard in exchange for freeing 80 pension-age prisoners who had been sitting in Israeli jails for more than 20 years and who broke up negotiations with the Palestinian Authority over the release of 14 Arab Israeli prisoners, was prepared to give Hamas 1,000 young and healthy terrorists, among them Arabs Israelis. While Netanyahu refused to allow Abbas any sign of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, he did not hesitate to recognize Hamas as sovereign in Gaza.
Breaking the record for hypocrisy was chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni, who added another layer of carpenter’s glue to the chair she occupies in the Justice Ministry. Livni toed the prime minister’s line, and with an impressive show of eye-rolling argued that the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation pact “undermines peace efforts and the opportunity that was only recently created.” What Livni forgot to say was that even if the negotiations are temporarily resuscitated, they will merely continue the fruitless talks she had been conducting during the past eight months.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.587007
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