RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is something of an event when a long-standing friend of Israel chooses to publicly criticize it and recommend recognising Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) (but not Hamas-controlled Gaza) as a sovereign ‘Palestine.’ In the case of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, writing recently in the Australian Financial Review (14 Feb.), this was always going to be newsworthy, given his long role in passionately standing up for Israel in the labor movement at home and abroad amidst the radical furies of the 1970s.

Accordingly, Mr Hawke’s views command attention and their provenance can have an impact on an ALP seeking to define its stance. In fact, it probably has: since his piece appeared, former Labor Foreign Ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have felt called upon renew their own calls for recognising ‘Palestine’ and they now been joined by former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Mr Hawke was once an eloquent proponent of the view that Israel could not relinquish territories to forces inimical to its existence. Yet his views began to alter, perhaps as early as the late 1970s, but certainly by the mid-1980s. It is not unreasonable to suppose that his Israeli Labor counterparts, who were increasingly adopting the view that a Palestinian state might defuse the conflict, exerted an influence on his thinking. Witnessing a seemingly unending sequence of bloodshed and uneasy respites over decades inclines people of goodwill to suppose that a bold initiative might break the tragic logjam. And indeed, the Israeli Labor Party did eventually embrace this point of view, chartering in 1993 the Oslo peace process with Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), upon whose probity its ultimate success depended.

It did not work out as intended, at least on the Israeli side. The PA regime established in Gaza and Jericho in 1994, later progressively extended to other major population centers in the West Bank, proved a corrupt and violent entity which, far from fostering a renovation of Palestinian society away from terrorism and conquest towards peace and accommodation, actually incubated the jihadist terror organizations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Children within the PA became hostage to an educational system replete with incitement to hatred and murder. One need only view a few video clips of Palestinian classrooms, with their pupils interviewed openly and proudly on PA television, extolling the religious and national duty of murdering Israelis, to see the bloodcurdling effectiveness of this sort of pedagogy.

None of this was altered or ameliorated by the transfer by Israel of territory, funds and, tragically, even arms, to Arafat’s forces, to say nothing of the vast inflow of foreign capital: in the Oslo era, Palestinians became the largest per capita recipients of international aid while, for example, tragically destitute Niger, with one doctor per 33,000 people, got peanuts.

Ambitious peace plans, going beyond what most Israelis before, then and since regarded as prudent, the first brokered by US President Bill Clinton in 2000-1, the second proposed by then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, were rebutted without counter-offer by the PA.

At the Maghain Aboth Synagogue in Singapore, to about 200 members of Singapore’s
Jewish community of about 2500 people, Bibi Netanyahu has declared: “I feel that Singapore and Israel are kindred nations. I find it a special privilege and an honour to be the first Israeli Prime Minister to make an official visit to Singapore. This follows the visit of Premier Lee to Israel, the first official visit of the Prime Minister of Singapore to Israel and it’s an obvious bond, a growing bond.

Seventy years ago, if you looked at Israel and you looked at Singapore, there wasn’t much to see. But there’s a lot to see and it’s not, I think, accidental that our two nations formed this bond between us because we are both inspired to do things, to punch above our weight.

Israel is the innovation nation, we’re both entrepreneurial centres. We have innate talent and we have great drive to succeed.

I believe that great powers around the world look at Israel and Singapore today and see tremendous economic opportunities. Tremendous. And one reason that that is the case is that we have an unbridled spirit and we put it to use. That spirit is something that we’ve enshrined in our peoples for a long time, for a long time. The Jewish People have passed learning from one generation to another, an inquisitive mindset and the ability to produce new things.

I don’t have to say that to the Jewish community in Singapore because you’ve been here for almost two centuries and you have that entrepreneurial quest for many, many decades, and I think that you serve as a human bridge between Singapore and Israel. I know that you care for the State of Israel. I know you care for Jewish traditions. This gathering is an indication of that concern and that passion.

I also want to point out to you that I recently visited two Muslim countries, one is Azerbaijan and the other is Kazakhstan. And in those Muslim countries, in Kazakhstan I visited a synagogue.

And Jewish children in Kazakhstan were singing Hebrew songs, as they sang here, in a Muslim state and that reflects the kind of world we’d like to see: a world of tolerance; a world of diversity; a world that is opposed to the world that is being challenged today by the forces of barbarism and intolerance.

When Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman offered the other day for Israel to turn Gaza into “the Singapore of the Middle East,” with a seaport, airport and industrial zones, if Hamas would stop firing rockets, building tunnels and seizing Israeli citizens, the terrorist group had a curt response.

“If we wanted to turn Gaza into Singapore, we would have done it ourselves,” Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas leader, told an Arabic-language newspaper. “We do not need favors from anyone.”

Al-Zahar’s exchange with Lieberman, which came just days after Hamas chose the ruthless murderer Yehiya Sinwar as its new leader, puts in perspective the silly kerfuffle over President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States is no longer firmly fixed on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To refresh memories, Palestinian territory is split in two, with the Palestinian Authority, or PA, running the West Bank while Hamas runs Gaza. The PA dances a devious two-step, promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace with the West while praising Jew-killing, martyrdom and “resistance” with its own people.

Hamas, by contrast, is forthright, calling for Israel’s destruction before every audience. And while everyone who supports the two-state solution – which is almost every respected voice in foreign policy circles – focuses on Israel and the PA, Hamas is the huge obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace that nobody wants to acknowledge.

Hamas has ruled Gaza – a 141-square-mile strip of nearly two million Palestinians that borders Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea – since it ousted the PA in a violent coup in 2007. It has fought three wars with Israel since 2008, with its soldiers firing rockets and building tunnels to attack the Jewish state and hiding in schools and hospitals to ensure maximum civilian carnage when Israel responds.

So, here’s an inconvenient truth: Whether pursuing the two-state solution or a more controversial one-state formula of Palestinian rights under Israeli rule, would-be peacemakers begin not with two warring entities but, in fact, three – Israel, the PA and Hamas. And no one can wish away that reality.

Last week, Hamas received an offer that no sane entity would turn down. The offer did not come from Hamas’s allies in Iran and the Islamic world. The offer, to turn the impoverished Gaza Strip into “the Singapore of the Middle East,” came from Israel.

“The Gazans must understand that Israel, which withdrew from the Gaza Strip to the last millimeter, is not the source of their suffering — it is the Hamas leadership, which doesn’t take their needs into consideration… The moment Hamas gives up its tunnels and rockets, we’ll be the first to invest.” — Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Hamas does not want a new “Singapore” in the Middle East. Hamas wants Israel to disappear from the face of the earth. The welfare of the Palestinians living under its rule is the last thing on the mind of Hamas. The dispute is not about improving the living conditions of Palestinians, as far as Hamas is concerned. Instead, it is about the very existence of Israel.

Hamas deserves credit for one thing: its honesty concerning its intentions to destroy Israel and kill as many Jews as possible. Hamas does not want 40,000 new jobs for the unemployed poor Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It would rather see these unemployed Palestinians join its ranks and become soldiers in the jihad to replace Israel with an Islamic empire.

The Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas has once again demonstrated its priorities: killing Jews. That clearly takes precedence over easing the plight of the two million Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip.

Since Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007, the conditions of the Palestinians living there have gone from bad to worse. Crisis after crisis has hit those under the Hamas rule; electricity and water as well as lack of medicine and proper medical care are in dangerously short supply.

Disputes between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have left the Gaza Strip dangerously short of fuel, resulting in massive power outages. Palestinians there consequently have had to resort to using wood for cooking and heating. Hamas, which has brought about three wars that wreaked havoc on its people, is unable to provide them with basic needs.

Last week, Hamas received an offer that no sane entity would turn down. It is to be noted that the offer did not come from Hamas’s friends and allies in Iran and the Arab and Islamic world. Rather, the offer, which promises to turn the Gaza Strip, where most residents live in the poverty of “refugee camps,” into “the Singapore of the Middle East,” came from Israel.

Specifically, the offer was made by Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who proposed building a seaport and an airport, as well as industrial zones that would help create 40,000 jobs in the Gaza Strip, if Hamas agreed to demilitarization and to dismantling the tunnels and rocket systems it has built up.

“The Gazans must understand that Israel, which withdrew from the Gaza Strip to the last millimeter, is not the source of their suffering — it is the Hamas leadership, which doesn’t take their needs into consideration,” Lieberman said in a televised message to the residents of the Gaza Strip. “The moment Hamas gives up its tunnels and rockets, we’ll be the first to invest.”

Only Israel has ever made such an offer to Hamas. Such a plan would vastly improve the living conditions of the Gaza Strip population. All Hamas is required to do is abandon its weapons and plans to kill Jews, and return the bodies of missing Israeli soldiers.

Most reporters for mainstream American news organizations were loathe to describe the obvious improvement in the atmosphere when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Donald Trump held their joint press conference on Wednesday, compared to the frigid and tense poses when Netanyahu and former President Barack Obama held joint appearances in the preceding eight years.

It was not hard to understand why the Israeli prime minister was smiling during his interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News the next day. One reason is that both Trump and Netanyahu are aware they help their own political positions by strengthening the ties between the two countries.

But the reality is deeper: The two men get along because they actually see the world the same way. Obama had a very different world view. Although he saw a link between Israel and the United States, this was mainly as colonialist bullies. No American president before Obama, and hopefully none in the future, will ever be so equivocal about his own country’s history and values.

The improved special relationship between Israel and the United States is not entirely new. President George W. Bush had solid ties with Israel’s leaders and endorsed a 2004 letter ahead of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza acknowledging that the 1949 borders were not permanent and that facts on the ground made it inevitable that many Jewish communities beyond the Green Line would not be uprooted in a future peace agreement. Obama ignored this letter, refused to give it any authority, and, along with others in the White House and State Department, attacked Israel after each and every bit of news of new Jewish housing in the West Bank, as if those were crimes against humanity. No supposed foe of the United States received such scorn and rebuke over eight years as Israel. And there was the coup de grace in Obama’s final months, the American abstention at the United Nations on Security Council Resolution 2334, which effectively resulted in awarding the entire territory to the Palestinians and treating any Israeli activity in the area as illegal.

American officials argued they needed to make it clear to Israel they were unhappy about the “stepped-up” pace of settlement activity, which represents an obstacle to achieving the two-state solution. The Obama action, forcefully defended by Secretary of State John Kerry (who seems to be contemplating a run for president in 2020), ignored pretty much all the other reasons for the failure. The Palestinians themselves are divided into two political entities, one run by Hamas, the other by the Palestinian Authority. Elections for PA president and parliament have not been held in over a decade. No Palestinian leader has ever been willing to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state and that there will be no “right of return” for Palestinians who never lived in or who left Israel and are falsely classified as refugees — more than 98% of the so-called Palestinian refugees. Only among Palestinians is refugee status conferred to endless descendants of the original refugees. The refugee issue was one of five mentioned by Max Singer in a Wall Street Journal column calling for telling the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

President Trump told Prime Minister Netanyahu in their joint press conference on Wednesday, he “likes the one both parties like.” He also said on another occasion that he wasn’t going to pressure Israel to make a deal.

The importance of his remarks is that the object of the exercise for the US is to make a deal rather than to create a Palestinian state. The push back on this has been substantial, not only from the EU and the UN but also from some officials in the State Department.

To deflect some of the criticism, the Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, framed it this way, “We absolutely support the two-state solution but we are thinking out of the box as well.”

“The solution to what will bring peace in the Middle East is going to come from the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority,” Haley said. “The United States is just there to support the process.”

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates have been working together with Israel to confront their common enemy, Iran. Both Netanyahu and Trump want to build on this and formalize it. They hope that as part of building this alliance, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will soften their demands on Israel regarding the solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict or perhaps enter a peace agreement with Israel without reference to the conflict.

DEBKAfile reports: “…these sentiments reflected agreement in principle between Trump and Netanyahu to seek an Israeli peace accord with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates as the lead-in to negotiations for an accord with the Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan and Turkey with whom Israel already has normal relations would jump in later. This deal fits in with the US plan reported more than once on these pages for a regional peace between the Sunni Arab nations and the Jewish State.”

At the press conference, Trump also said,

“This is one more reason why I reject unfair and one-sided actions against Israel at the United Nations — just treated Israel, in my opinion, very, very unfairly — or other international forums, as well as boycotts that target Israel.”