Stephen Walt: Talking to Hamas?

Why the Oslo Process Failed

In Talking to Hamas? Harvard Professor Stephen Walt writes:

The same principle applies here. Back in 1993, when the Oslo peace process began, only about 15 percent of the Palestinian population backed Hamas. Then Israel, the United States, and the PLO squandered the historic opportunity that Oslo afforded. Israel continued to expand its settlements, the United States put no pressure on it to stop and mismanaged the negotiations (especially at Camp David in 2000), and the Palestinian Authority remained deeply corrupt and made its own share of blunders, too. George W. Bush made the problem worse on his watch, refusing to engage in the peace process and letting Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert do pretty much whatever they wanted.

The result?: Hamas grew more and more popular, and eventually won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006. According to Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, the recent assault on Gaza seems to have increased their popularity even more. Bottom line: If we didn't want to have to deal with Hamas, we should have been following a different policy for the past 15 years.

Because Professor Walt does not speak Hebrew, does not -- as far as I know -- have inside connections into the Israeli government or military, and does not have a particularly deep knowledge either of Israeli or E. European Jewish history, he misses the major issue that impeded success of the Oslo negotiation even if the Israeli government entered the process in good faith and even if the US government were willing to "jawbone" the Zionist side of the negotiations.

Oslo failed because the immigration of ~1 million former Soviet Jews gave both senior Israeli government officials and also the more important leaders of Judonia the feeling that they no longer had to worry so seriously about the "demographic problem."

In addition, even though the Israel Lobby (the public face of Judonia) routinely compares him to someone that published Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Professor Walt completely misunderstands the meaning of the reference to the Protocols in the Hamas Charter when he writes in his blog entry:

Of course, talking to Hamas is unappealing for several obvious reasons. As Cohen notes, the Hamas charter contains a number of truly "vile" elements, including some odious anti-Semitic declarations. For Hamas to invoke a discredited forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is both offensive and ignorant, and it weakens their claim to be taken seriously as a political movement. And then there's the moral hazard problem: If we start talking to Hamas, do we encourage other extremist groups to think they can get recognition too if they hold out long enough?

Here are my relevant blog entries:

• Was Fr. Coughlin an Anti-Semite?
• Stephen Walt: New Father Coughlin??

Here is the relevant text from the first blog entry.

Article 32 of the Charter states:

The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

The Charter probably cites the Protocols under the assumption that it must contain information about Zionist goals.

Article 32 in fact is evidence of the insignificance of the Protocols and European anti-Semitism as sources of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim animosity towards the State of Israel.

In fact, I have never met a Palestinian or Muslim that has actually read it. I once gave a copy to a Palestinian friend, but she confessed that she found it too boring to read.

I have scoured several versions of the Protocols in English, Russian, Polish, and German. None include a discussion of the borders of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, but the Introduction to the 1922 edition entitled WORLD CONQUEST THROUGH WORLD GOVERNMENT, PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, tries to fit Zionism into the conspiratorial framework described by the Protocols without any discussion of the ultimate or intended borders of the Zionist State.

The Hamas Charter is really referring to the Borders of Destiny (Gvulot Ye`ud/Yi`ud), which were clearly defined in standard Zionist geography textbooks of the Mandatory period. (See The Borders of Destiny.)]

In any case, as I often point out, it makes no sense for the US government or anyone that supports Zionism or the continued existence of the State of Israel to accuse Hamas of extremism, for it is so far beyond extreme that it is psychotic to believe that Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim had the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of an etymological relationship between the word "Jew" and the word "Judea" that it is psychotic.

By Zionist reasoning one could argue that the Irish have the right to ethnically cleanse and steal Rome because the Irish mostly practice the Roman Catholic religion, which contains the word "Roman" in its name.

If we had any sort of rational or realistic political or foreign policy discourse in the USA, we would be discussing which asylums would be best for treating Zionists and not giving them high positions in the US government.

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