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. . . ISRAEL see "PLACES" for related links - We 'Palestinians' will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.... All the rich Jews who will get compensation will travel to America.... We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. Within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem....You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely 'Palestinian' State....I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews. --'Palestinian' leader Yasser Arafat [30 January 1996], addressing 40 Arab diplomats at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speech "The Impending Total Collapse of Israel." - His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. --Arthur James Balfour (18481930) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [19201925]. Writing to Baron Rothschild [2 November 1917]. - It was hot here on the streets of Tel Aviv, and hotter still where he was going, of course. The streets were busy with people scurrying about shopping or pursuing business. There was the expected number of police about, but more discordant was the occasional civilian toting a Uzi sub-machine gun, doubtless on his or her way to or from a reserve meeting. It was the sort of thing to shock an American anti-gun nut (or warm the heart of a pro-gun nut). Ryan figured that the weapons display probably knocked the hell out of purse-snatching and street crime. Ordinary civil crime, he knew, was pretty rare here. But terrorist bombings and other less pleasant acts were not. And things were getting worse instead of better. That wasn't new either. --Tom Clancy (1947 ) American novelist. _The Sum of All Fears_ [1991], Ch. 5 - - [On the United Nations General Assembly:] If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions. --Abba Eban [Aubrey Solomon] (19152002) Foreign minister of Israel [19661974]. Surrounded by hostile armies on all its land frontiers, subjected to savage and relentless hostility, exposed to penetration raids and assaults by day and by night, suffering constant toll of life among its citizens, bombarded by threats of neighboring governments to accomplish its extinction by armed force ... embattled, blockaded, besieged, Israel alone among the nations faces a battle for its security anew with every approaching nightfall and every rising dawn. --Abba Eban [Aubrey Solomon] (19152002) Foreign minister of Israel [19661974]. On 1 November 1956 when he was Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. In Conor Cruise O'Brien _The Siege_ [1988 edn.] p. 391. - - He walked into shul, synagogue. I nodded my acknowledgement, as I always do. He made some strange gesture, which I didn't comprehend. I continued praying. A few minutes later, he walked over to me and said: "Didn't you hear?" "Hear about what?" I replied. He grew impatient, almost frustrated. "Didn't you HEAR?" I understood that he was talking about last night's terror attack on Ben Yehuda Mall, a trendy night spot frequented not only by Israelis, but also Western tourists. I assumed that he obviously was intimating that someone we knew was hurt or killed. I replied: "About who?" He looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. "About who? About everyone who was attacked last night." I nodded. "Yes, of course I heard." "Then why aren't YOU crying?" His words shot through me like a spear piercing my heart. Our sages teach that "Words that come from the heart, enter the heart." He was right, of course. Why wasn't I crying? ... What has happened to all of us, myself included? We have turned to stone. Some would call it "numbness." Some would call it "collective national shock." Some would say that we all have suffered never-ending trauma and it has affected our senses. Frankly, the excuses are worthless. All the reasons in the world don't justify our distance from the real pain that is burning in our midst. When an attack happens, in the heat of the moment, we frantically check to see if someone we know has been hurt or killed. And then, if we find out that "our friends and family are safe," we sigh a deep sigh of relief, grunt and grumble about the latest tragic event and then, we continue with our robotic motions and go on with our lives. We have not lost our minds, my friends. We have lost our hearts. And that is why we keep on losing our lives. --Yechezkel "Chezi" Goldberg "Because, if you don't cry, who will?" [2 December 2001] [The author, a counselor for youth and families at risk, was among those murdered on January 29, 2004 in a Jerusalem bus bombing.] - We're always in the headlines. _The New York Times_. CNN. The BBC. We get more coverage than India. Than China. Than the entire continent of Africa. There's so much news about us, you'd think we're also a billion people, not six million. We're all the time on TV and front pages, so people think they know us. Unsmiling soldiers. Screaming settlers. Crying mourners. Bearded guys in black hats. Well, Israelis are much more than those photos. We complain about our teachers. Worry about exams. Flirt at parties. Wonder if we look good in our bathing suits. We curse at traffic jams and cut in line at the movies. We've got normal fears and dreams. Like young people everywhere, we want to find love and be loved. We're just normal people trying to live in this abnormal, tiny, beautiful country. --Ori Heffetz, in Donna Rosenthal _The Israelis_ [2003]. - - ...Downstairs, before we left, the head of the hospital, an Israeli named Audrey, was showing me the children's waiting room. I couldn't help but notice, all around, an Arab woman with her son, an Arab family over there checking in, Arab children playing with the toys while waiting. The doctor saw the look on my face and laughed. "Oh, yes, we treat everyone." I guess I was astonished. She just shrugged. "We're Jews. This is how we live. It's also for the future. They're not going anywhere, and we're not going anywhere. There will eventually be peace. There has to be." When? A month? A year? A hundred years? More? She didn't know. I had to say it. You're incredible. You take everyone, you treat everyone, no one goes first, no one goes last, you just go in order of who needs help. That's, like, Mother Teresa stuff. "We're not saints, we're just doing our jobs. It's not easy, I admit. And it gets hard when they cheer when the bodies are brought in." I looked at her. What did you say? She sighed. "Yes, it gets hard when they cheer." This was one of the times during my trip when I held up my hands and said, "Stop. Wait." I turned and walked away to breathe deeply for a minute. I wonder if they've restocked that mini-bar. Yeah, probably. It's a good hotel. I didn't meet one Jew the whole trip who didn't think there would be peace, not one. "We can work it out. We have to. They're not going anywhere. Neither are we." Of course, it gets hard when they cheer. I guess it does. --Larry Miller "It Gets Hard When They Cheer" [19 August 2002] - We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you. --Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi, to the Israelis - We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This does not leave much room for compromise. --Golda Meir (18981978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [19691974] of the State of Israel. [17 March 1969] Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil. --Golda Meir (18981978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [19691974] of the State of Israel. Speech in Jerusalem [10 June 1973]. - - "Reviewing the Hundred Years' War" By George Melloan _The Wall Street Journal_ January 10, 2006 Ariel Sharon has no peer as a symbol of Israel's 58-year struggle for survival. The 77-year-old warrior, now fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital, fought in the 1948 struggle for independence and played key roles in the long string of conflicts that followed. Last year, he conducted a daring maneuver perhaps his last by withdrawing Jewish settlements from Gaza, not long before a cerebral hemorrhage felled him. His old antagonists are gone. Yasser Arafat, who spent his career futilely trying to drive Israel into the sea, died at age 75 on Nov. 11, 2004. Saddam Hussein is on trial in Iraq. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader who provoked the Six Day War in 1967, passed from the scene in 1970. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, financier of Arab causes, left us last August. The world is left wondering what comes next in this saga. Ehud Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, has taken the reins as acting prime minister. The Palestinian Authority, which Arafat left in a shambles of corruption and ineptitude, is in total disarray. After parliamentary elections later this month, it may fall under the control of Hamas, one of the territory's most relentless terrorist groups. [. . . ] The Arab-Israeli struggle might be equated at least in duration to the Hundred Years' War between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries. One could say it began in the early 20th century when Zionists began arriving in significant numbers in the Holy Lands, fleeing oppression in Europe. They augmented the Jewish population of what would later be called Palestine. Late in the 19th century, according to the most reliable studies, Jews were only about 10% of a population of about 700,000, with Christians a further 10% and Arabs most of the rest. But with the Zionist movement Jewish numbers began to grow. With their socialist ideology and commitment to soul-purifying physical labor the Zionists formed tightly knit, dedicated communities foreign to the natives of the region. Great Britain encouraged the Zionists, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising the Jews a homeland in the region even as the British army was driving out the Turks. After the World War I allies destroyed Ottoman rule, the British under a League of Nations mandate further encouraged Jewish settlement. The local Arabs mounted anti-Zionist riots. One of the leaders of these demonstrations was Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who would later make common cause with Adolf Hitler, imploring the Germans to thwart any British effort to create a Jewish state. Most of the Jews who migrated to Palestine in the '30s and '40s were not Zionists. They were fleeing the Holocaust and had nowhere else to go. But the Zionists formed the hard muscle that overthrew the British mandate in 1948 and defeated the Arabs who tried to block the establishment of Israel. Their kibbutzim collectives produced the tough native-born "sabras," among them Ariel Sharon, who formed the core of the Israeli military forces. With roots going back to the 19th century, the Zionists had an uncommon dedication to the defense of a Jewish state. There would be plenty of fighting. In 1956, Israel, with British and French support, invaded the Sinai after Nasser seized the Suez Canal, but to little avail. In June 1967 came the Six Day War and the IDF's lightning victory over the combined forces of neighboring Arab states that gave Israel control of large territories formerly controlled by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Then, in October 1973, there was the Yom Kippur War, which Israel might have lost had Gen. Sharon not conducted a bold tank maneuver to neutralize Egyptian surface-to-air missile batteries near the Suez Canal. Now that is all history. Ariel Sharon is finally hors de combat and his long record will go into the history books. Israel will continue to fight. The barren land the Zionists settled so long ago has become a strong state of 6.5 million people, mostly Jews. It has gradually modified the socialism that hampered its economic development. The Hundred Years' War will continue, but casualties are fewer and the U.S. has established a military presence in the region, grounds for hope that the war is winding down. - We are destined to live together on the same soil in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood. . . we who have fought against you, the Palestinians --we say today to you in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears! Enough! (At signing of peace agreement at White House [13 September 1993].) --Yitzhak Rabin (19221995) Israeli statesman, soldier, and prime minister [19741977, 19921995]. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for Peace in 1994 and was assasinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995. The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel. --Harry S. Truman (18841972) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19451953]. Statement. 6:11 p.m. Washington time, 14 May 1948; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932. Cohan & Major explain: Recognition was accorded 11 minutes after the proclamation of the state of Israel, and Israel thereafter became the protectorate of the United States in the heart of the Arab world. While their killers were honored, Voice of Palestine called Tali Hatuel and her daughters "terrorists" in its Monday morning broadcast, Widlanski noted. The radio's initial report on the attack said only that "five settlers" had been killed, but failed to identify the victims as a pregnant woman and four young girls. Nor was the brutal manner in which they were executed reported. Further investigation of the attack this week revealed the two "Palestinian" gunmen first shot at the Hatuel's car from several meters away, and then approached to finish off the family from close range. --"Arafat's PA honors killers of Jewish family" Despite claims to the contrary, the Palestinian Liberation Organization has never changed its charter declaring Israel has no right to exist, the PLO's "foreign minister" Farouk Kaddoumi said in an interview today. Speaking to the Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab, the PLO official also said when Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat talks about the need to pursue the "struggle" against Israel, he is referring to the "armed struggle," the Jerusalem Post reported. --"PLO: Charter denies Israel's right to exist" http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38172 [22 April 2004] - Europe's Disproportionate Criticism By Gerald M. Steinberg _The Wall Street Journal_ July 17, 2006 JERUSALEM In early 2000, the European Union was an enthusiastic supporter of unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon. Paris was about to take over the EU presidency in July and played a dominant role in the discussions. The French foreign and defense ministers pressed Israel to return its military forces to the international border. In detailed talks that took place at the French ambassador's residence in Jaffa, in which I participated as an academic consultant, the Europeans assured us that once Israel retreated, Hezbollah would lose its raison d'κtre as a "militia" and transform itself into a political party. France and its partners would send peacekeepers to prevent terror and missile attacks against Israel, help the Lebanese army take control of the border, and disarm Hezbollah. In May that year, the Israeli military left Lebanon. The United Nations certified that the withdrawal was complete. But Europe did nothing. Hezbollah's leaders celebrated a great "military victory," and Iranian "advisers" provided intelligence, training and thousands more of missiles, some with ranges of 75 kilometers and more that could penetrate deep into Israeli territory and for the first time hit Haifa, Israel's third biggest city. Instead of the promised transformation, Hezbollah took positions right across Israel's border and prepared for the next round of the war. Fearing international and particularly European condemnation, Israel did nothing to prevent this dangerous buildup. Emboldened by Israeli restraint, Hezbollah staged the first cross-border attack and kidnapping only five months after Israel's withdrawal, in October 2000. Europe's reaction back then was limited to repeating the usual mantras, calling on Israel to "act with restraint" and to "give diplomacy a chance." Now, after steady escalation and attrition to which Israel is particularly vulnerable, Hezbollah triggered a full-scale confrontation by firing another round of missiles at Israeli cities and staging a kidnapping attack, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed. In tandem with Palestinian assaults from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which also featured missiles and kidnapped soldiers to be traded for terrorists, this opened a two-front war. This time, though, Israel moved quickly to finally dismantle the strategic threat in Lebanon. No state can simply stand by while its citizens are being killed and abducted, its cities routinely shelled, and part of its population forced to live in fear and sleep in bomb shelters. Hezbollah erroneously thought its missiles and the support from Iran and Syria would allow it to continue attacking Israel with impunity. Europe's role, once again, is limited to repeating the same old tired phrases. The EU called Israel's response and attacks on Beirut and in Gaza "disproportionate" and violations of international law. France in particular was outraged. "For several hours, there has been a bombardment of an airport of an entirely sovereign country, a friend of France... this is a disproportionate act of war," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said. It may have escaped the minister that the initial act of war originated from Lebanon and that the target of this unprovoked aggression is supposedly also a "sovereign country" and "friend of France." The knee-jerk condemnation of their country was not lost on Israelis who recall the broken promises from 2000 and the visceral antipathy toward them when they had to fight Arafat's terror war. Beyond the rhetoric, European officials offer no framework for a proper and "proportionate" level of force in response to mass terror aimed at the ultimate goal of "wiping Israel off the map." Few in Europe probably realize that the EU's failure to act in response to Iran's nuclear weapons efforts, and the three years that were wasted in negotiations while Iran began enriching uranium, only strengthened Israel's decision to act forcefully against the terror threats posed by Hezbollah and Hamas, who act as Tehran's proxies. Israel's strategy is twofold. The immediate goal is to remove Hezbollah's acute threat by crippling its military capabilities and driving their troops from the border zone. Attacks on Lebanese infrastructure are designed to prevent the resupply of Hezbollah and to pressure the Lebanese government to establish full sovereignty over the country. It is Lebanon, not Israel, that is in violation of international law as Beirut still has not implemented U.N. resolution 1559, which demands that Hezbollah be disarmed. At the same time, and this is Israel's medium-term goal, going forcefully after Iran's prodigy in Lebanon sends a powerful message to Tehran. It restores Israel's deterrence capability, a crucial move in preventing future confrontations with Iran on a much larger scale. But many idealistic European policy makers cannot see that a small war stopped prematurely now may only pave the way for a much larger war later. In order to understand Israel's military actions, it is imperative to consider the two powers standing behind Hezbollah. The larger strategic threat to Israel is the Damascus-Tehran axis. To view Israel's actions in Beirut and Gaza as "disproportionate" means ignoring the radical Islamic regime in Tehran, which threatens to destroy Israel and is bent on acquiring the weapons to actually carry out its threat. At the same time, Europe particularly France has invested heavily in the reconstruction of Lebanon and the international isolation of the Syrian regime. From this perspective, the damage to Beirut's airport and infrastructure and the strain on the Lebanese government are justifiably worrying. But if European leaders are serious about preventing instability and promoting their own economic and security interests, they will also have to share the costs of containing terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. To help resolve the immediate crisis and prevent further damage to Lebanon's fragile economic and political structure, Europe's leaders can stiffen Beirut's backbone by conditioning aid to the release of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Cease-fire initiatives must lead to Hezbollah's disarmament. By tying further economic assistance to an end to terror attacks, Europe can actually help create the basis for long-term stability. And of course, it must pressure Tehran and Damascus. Instead of reflexively labeling Israel's belated use of force as "disproportionate," the leaders of the EU must learn to make their own security policies proportionate and realistic. Mr. Steinberg directs the conflict management program at Bar Ilan University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. - - Hezbollah and Pericles By Fania Oz-Salzberger _The Wall Street Journal_ July 18, 2006 War does not preclude clear thinking. When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago, to the last inch, and from Gaza one year ago, to the last inch, scenarios of over-the-border hostilities were high on the public agenda. Thus, even as smoke rises over northern Israel, Lebanon and Gaza, some clearheaded points are being made on the Israeli side of the border. Here is a brief selection. First and most crucial, a majority of Israelis consider this sad unleashing of Israeli firepower in Gaza and Lebanon to be, up to now, a just war. It has both a casus belli and a convincing rationale. Hostilities were initiated by militias strongly associated with the elected governments in both regions, targeting IDF personnel strictly on the Israeli side of the border. Since many media consumers have short memories, a reminder is in order: Over the last five months, some 800 Kassam rockets were fired at towns and villages in southwestern Israel. The town of Sderot alone was hit several hundred times. Israel occupied not an inch of Gaza at that time. Israel certainly responded, as any sovereign state would; and it did so not by reinvading Gaza, but with air strikes against militants and launchers. Palestinian civilians were hurt; Europeans vocally reproached us; the rockets kept coming. Then came the recent assault on soldiers stationed within Israel, killing three and kidnapping one. Hezbollah of Lebanon, wholly unprovoked, simply liked the idea and sent a force into northern Israel and two follow-up ambushes, killing a total of eight soldiers and kidnapping two. Both assaults breached a fully legitimate international border, in the aftermath of a full Israeli withdrawal just in case some media consumers have forgotten. Possible lesson: A sense of right still counts for something amidst all the smoke. Which leads to a second clearheaded point. Why is Israel's response not "proportional," and why don't we rush to negotiate with the kidnappers, as so many peace-lovers in the Western world would like us to do? Let me be blunt: A "proportional" response would please many Europeans no end, but would scarcely move a hair in the beard of a Hamas or a Hezbollah leader. They are not set to be gently pushed into moderation, or to hammer out an exquisite compromise with the Jewish state, but to wipe it out as soon as they can. If we shoot a little, they will shoot back all the way into Islamic eternity. If we "negotiate," cave in to blackmail and release Hamas and Hezbollah militants held in Israeli prisons in return for our three kidnapped soldiers, they will send them back to bomb schools and buses and pizza parlors in no time at all. Negotiation? For sure. It worked with Egypt and Jordan. It would work with Saudi Arabia. It would work with moderate Palestinians as soon as they recapture their own polity from Hamas and Hezbollah. But it would not work with the latter, who along with their Iranian allies openly declare that they want us dead, not merely complacent. Possible lesson: Compromise with ultra-extremists usually misfires. And here is a sad, third clearheaded point: Democracy, in the Middle East as elsewhere, is not just about universal suffrage. The Palestinians brought Hamas to power, and Hezbollah is a coalition partner in the Lebanese government. Please reflect on this, dear Western lovers of democracy: Is majority vote truly the sole gist of it all? Here is a painful truth: Israel is killing civilians inadvertently, though arguably too freely as it targets militants in Gaza and Lebanon. Yet the hair-raising aspect of it is that many of those civilians voted Hamas, and some voted Hezbollah, into their own governments. Democratically elected, these groups care little for the lives of their own citizens, even less for the Israeli Arabs they have bombed and killed in recent days, and null for Israeli civilians. Yet their voters keep applauding. Gazan and Lebanese children are innocent victims of this policy, and many Israelis I must assert this even in the face of disbelief truly grieve for them. But the adults? Are these men and women hostages of live-in terrorists, dumb natives managed by shrewd colonialists, or are they perhaps accountable civil agents who made a very bad choice in one of their first democratic performances? Possible lesson: Reread Pericles. Arab democracy is not hopeless, a fourth clearheaded reflection suggests. The Middle East is divided between those who jeer with any rocket hitting Haifa, and those in Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia who secretly hope for both Hamas and Hezbollah to vanish into the limbo of lost lunatics and make way for better and saner Arab regimes. In the aftermath of the current war, Ehud Olmert's Kadima-Labor coalition government would promptly talk with a peace-seeking Palestinian government; this is why a majority of Israelis voted them in to begin with. Possible lesson: Moderates don't easily lose their nerve these days. My final point may be news to both friends and foes of Israel: This society is holding strong. Opinions here are divided, for sure, about the wisdom and morality of using force, and about the wisdom and effectiveness of withholding force. The public argument keeps sizzling as the north of Israel, including my own Jewish-Arab university of Haifa, is under fire. For some reason, going beyond Israel and deeply linked to Pericles, I take this to be good news. Ms. Oz-Salzberger is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa.  . . The danger lies in Islamic psychology, which cannot integrate itself into the world of efficiency and progress, that lives in a world of illusion, perturbed by attacks of inferiority complexes and megalomania, lost in dreams of the holy sword. The danger stems from the totalitarian conception of the world, the passion for murder deeply rooted in their blood, from the lack of logic, the easily inflamed brains, the boasting, and above all: the blasphemous disregard for all that is sacred to the civilized world ... their reactions to anything have nothing to do with good sense. They are all emotional, unbalanced, instantaneous, senseless. It is always the lunatic that speaks from their throat. --Dr A. Carlebach, _Ma'ariv_ (Israeli newspaper) [7 October 1955]. An Israeli view of the Palestinian mentality. Fatah is the armed humanitarian movement whose goal is the freeing of the Jews from their nationalistic and Nazi enslavement and the finding of a final solution for the Jewish problem. --Fatah pamphlet [October 1968]; in Ze'ev Schiff and Raphael Rothstein _Fedayeen_ [1972] p.127. - "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas" By Andrew Higgins _The Wall Street Journal_ [24 January 2009] Moshav Tekuma, Israel Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago. "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction. Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric. Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed. Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire. Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm "requires more than a long cease-fire" and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state "living side by side in peace and security." A look at Israel's decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel's efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people. Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda. At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory. The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO's Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue "resistance." Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005. When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and '80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank. "When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results." Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran. Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda." When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza's Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas's appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel's main ally, the U.S. Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group's popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that "God has granted us a great victory." Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel's principal negotiating partner. "Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it," says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas. A Lack of Devotion Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia. After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement. At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank. "We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi. In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide. The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam. Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. "They said, 'Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,'" recalls Mr. Cohen. Instead, Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war. Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam. Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says. In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines. Mr. Segev says the army didn't want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent's secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO. 'An Alternative to the PLO' Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism. As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari. A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO." A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin's Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama's reach across Gaza. Around the time of Sheikh Yassin's arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a "diabolical" figure, he warned that Israel's policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force. "I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote. Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas." Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. "They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan." Declaring Jihad In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas's charter, released a year later, is studded with anti-Semitism and declares "jihad its path and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief." Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group's senior political leader in Gaza. In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting and killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin and sentenced him to life. It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy. Many of the deportees later returned to Gaza. Hamas built up its arsenal and escalated its attacks, while all along maintaining the social network that underpinned its support in Gaza. Meanwhile, its enemy, the PLO, dropped its commitment to Israel's destruction and started negotiating a two-state settlement. Hamas accused it of treachery. This accusation found increasing resonance as Israel kept developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land, particularly the West Bank. Though the West Bank had passed to the nominal control of a new Palestinian Authority, it was still dotted with Israeli military checkpoints and a growing number of Israeli settlers. Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas's support, and sometimes even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel's Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas's exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan. The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin. The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome. Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad officer who negotiated the deal that released Sheikh Yassin, says the cleric's freedom was hard to swallow, but Israel had no choice. After the fiasco in Jordan, Mr. Halevy was named director of Mossad, a position he held until 2002. Two years later, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike. Mr. Halevy has in recent years urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas. He says that "Hamas can be crushed," but he believes that "the price of crushing Hamas is a price that Israel would prefer not to pay." When Israel's authoritarian secular neighbor, Syria, launched a campaign to wipe out Muslim Brotherhood militants in the early 1980s it killed more than 20,000 people, many of them civilians. In its recent war in Gaza, Israel didn't set the destruction of Hamas as its goal. It limited its stated objectives to halting the Islamists' rocket fire and battering their overall military capacity. At the start of the Israeli operation in December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told parliament that the goal was "to deal Hamas a severe blow, a blow that will cause it to stop its hostile actions from Gaza at Israeli citizens and soldiers." Walking back to his house from the rubble of his neighbor's home, Mr. Cohen, the former religious affairs official in Gaza, curses Hamas and also what he sees as missteps that allowed Islamists to put down deep roots in Gaza. He recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin: "He told me: 'You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.' He was right." - The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight. --Jamal Husseini, to the UN Security Council [16 April 1948]. This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades. --Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [1948] We are the soldiers of God and we crave death violence will remain our only path. --statement issued by Islamic Jihad [1980s] - It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. --Golda Meir (18981978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [19691974] of the State of Israel. In _The Sunday Times_ [15 June 1969]. When the Arabs love their children more than they hate us, then there will be peace. --Golda Meir (18981978) A founder and the fourth prime minister [19691974] of the State of Israel. Quoted in _Newsday_ [11 February 1988]. - The Government of the State of Israel and the Palestinian team representing the Palestinian people agree that it is time to put an end to the decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement through the agreed political process. --Oslo Agreement [19 August 1993], brokered by the United States and facilitated by the government of Norway; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 937. Cohan & Major explain: The Agreement, which established an autonomous Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was sealed by a famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the south lawn of the White House. I'll never forget something that my father told me: When he was a teenager in Europe, all the walls were covered with graffiti that said, 'Jews, Go to Palestine.' And when he went back to Europe as an adult, all the walls were covered with graffiti that said, 'Jews, Get Out of Palestine.' And my father understood this message perfectly, the emotional meaning of this message, which was: Get out of here and get out of there. Just don't come to us. Don't be here and don't be there. In other words, don't be. We may not kill you that's dirty, we're not like that, but you will not be. You will die. --Amos Oz (1939 ) Israeli writer and journalist. The Jews ordered all my family to line up against a wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri (four) in the head, my sister Sameh (eight) in the cheek, my brother Mohammed (seven) in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children. --Fahimi Zidan, a 12-year-old Palestinian Arab boy, describes the massacre by a combined force of Irgun and Stern Gang of 254 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin in Palestine on 4 April 1948; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932. Cohan & Major explain: The massacre was perpetrated to stampede Arabs out of Palestine in order to clear the ground for Israeli settlement. It succeeded beyond expectation: at the close of the Arab- Israeli war in 1949 some four-fifths of the Arab population of Palestine had fled the territory to become refugees in neighbouring Arab states. The name Deir Yassin has since been branded on Palestinian minds. We are embarking on a course that will greatly endanger any hope of a peaceful alliance with forces who could be our allies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs who will be evicted from Palestine, even if they are to blame, and left hanging in mid-air, will grow to hate us. --Aharon Zisling, Israeli agriculture minister [16 June 1948]; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 932. Cohan & Major explain: The majority of Palestinian Arabs were systemically expelled from their homeland by Israeli forces so that Israelis could outnumber Palestinians in the new state they created during the war of 1948-9. At its end Israel controlled all of Palestine except for the Gaza Strip, which was occupied by Egypt, and the West Bank of the River Jordan, which was held by the Kingdom of Jordan. What Zisling said was all too true, but he represented a minority of Israeli opinion. - "Intransigent and Now in Charge" By David Pryce-Jones _The Wall Street Journal_ May 2, 2006 Reviewing Matthew Levitt's _Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad_ In less than 20 years, Hamas has arisen apparently out of nowhere to form the government in the Palestinian Authority. This is an astonishing success for a small group of largely anonymous fanatics. Like al Qaeda, the Taliban, Abu Musab Zarqawi's murder squad in Iraq, and Islamist groups in Egypt and Algeria, Hamas consists of men who will stop at nothing to impose what they consider to be true Muslim beliefs. This general politicizing of Islam is one of the most disturbing portents of our times. When Hamas started, about 1987, Yasser Arafat spoke for the Palestinians through the Palestine Liberation Organization and its military wing, Fatah. In spite of their nationalist rhetoric, Arafat and the PLO undertook no state-building but instead appropriated for themselves the huge sums of money provided for the purpose by well-intentioned but gullible international donors. In contrast, Hamas has raised funds from political Islamists everywhere and distributed them with relative honesty to poor Palestinians. Arafat's corruption was the precondition of Hamas's popularity. At the same time, Hamas has remade the nationalist cause in its own Islamist image. It rejects the two-state solution toward which the PLO and Israel were working in their tentative way, on the grounds that God decreed Palestine to be a Muslim trust in perpetuity. Israel therefore has to dissolve itself; otherwise it will be liquidated by force. Proving its resolution, Hamas has routinely ordered into action suicide bombers, and they have killed several hundred Israelis and injured thousands. Hamas presents them as "martyrs" for the faith and pays money to their families. Persuaded by a combination of welfare and violence, Palestinians voted Hamas into power in January and are now at the mercy of its Islamist regime. The dispute with Israel is no longer about territory and boundaries; it is about the need for all good Muslims to wage jihad until one side is victorious and the other exists no more. Iran, its proxy Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia share this apocalyptic view or at least support it. In the circumstances, mistakes and misunderstandings may well trigger a regional war with unforeseeable consequences. [...] In a chapter on Hamas's terrorism, Mr. Levitt examines how the movement's operatives knowingly radicalize young men (and a few young women) by desensitizing them to violence, portraying it to be an imperative of the faith. This process begins in primary schools and continues in youth movements and mosques and universities. Sacrificing the young in this ruthless way amounts to a death cult that is unbalancing the whole society and prejudicing its future. [...] - - We 'Palestinians' will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem. [. . .] All the rich Jews who will get compensation will travel to America.... We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. Within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.... You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely 'Palestinian' State....I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews. --Yasser Arafat (19292004) Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Addressing Arab diplomats at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speech "The Impending Total Collapse of Israel." [30 January 1996] - We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you. --Hezbollah leader Hussein Massawi, to the Israelis - We with Allah's help call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. --Osama bin Laden (1957 ) Terrorist founder of Al-Qaeda. Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders World Islamic Front Statement [23 February 1998]. end page | ISRAEL - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | RADICAL THOUGHT | TERRORISM 1 | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | |
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