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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Hamas vows no change to stance on Israel, disarmament despite elections |
| 2006-01-12 |
| Hamas's most prominent leader in Gaza and the West Bank, Mahmoud Zahar, said Wednesday that his faction would still refuse to recognize Israel or disarm even if it won in the Palestinian elections this month. "The calmness has ended," Mr. Zahar said, referring to the truce under which Palestinians agreed not to attack Israel through 2005. But he left open the possibility that Hamas might refrain from attacks on Israel "if not provoked." The elections will be Hamas's debut in official Palestinian politics, a process it has boycotted since the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1993. Since the group's founding in Gaza in 1987, its focus has been to fight Israel, and it has often used suicide bombers. Its long-term goal is to establish an Islamic theocracy over Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In a wide-ranging interview in English at his home, which was rebuilt after an Israeli missile attack in 2003 and is already scarred by bullets from recent skirmishes with his Fatah rivals, Mr. Zahar, 60, laid out his vision of the Palestinians' future. He said that if Hamas won the election on Jan. 25, it would not recognize agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But Hamas would work with Fatah in forming a new government, he said. "We do not want to replace Fatah," said Mr. Zahar, enveloped in a rust-colored woolen Bedouin robe and wearing rubber sandals in the marble-tiled reception room of his four-story home. On a table beside him stood a photograph of his eldest son, Khaled, who was killed in 2003 in an Israeli airstrike on their home. He added that even if Hamas won overwhelming support- which polls say is unlikely - all Palestinian factions would be invited to join a coalition government. "It will not be Hamas alone," he said. Mr. Zahar, who earned a medical degree in Cairo and ran a clinic in Gaza before helping to found Hamas, skirted the question of whether his group would change its long-standing goal of destroying Israel. And he dismissed warnings by the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, that the union might cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas became a part of the government and refused to recognize Israel's right to exist. Mr. Zahar said Hamas would try to develop direct trade with the world, cutting out Israel as intermediary, as is now required by an economic protocol signed in 1994 in Paris. He described that agreement as a disaster for the Palestinians, using the cost of gasoline as an example: it is five times more expensive when imported through Israel than if purchased directly from Egypt. When asked to speculate about the effects of the illness of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he refused, saying whoever leads Israel bears the same message. "They can put the poison in the honey to give it better taste," he said with a smile. But he added, "All of them are poison." He said that Hamas would not give up its weapons, as demanded by international peace mediators, but that as a partner in government, it would support the inclusion of all militias in a unified army that would disarm Palestinian clans fighting among themselves. He said a Palestinian army focus on protecting against what he described as Israeli incursions, like its recent shelling of northern Gaza to create a buffer zone. "If the aim is to protect the Israeli border, and to put all the guns in the Palestinian factions who are not ready to confront Israel, this will not be acceptable by anybody," he said. "But if the aim is to put all of the Palestinian guns on the border to protect our institutions, to protect our lands, I think that would be acceptable." Nor did he exclude the possibility of renewed attacks inside Israel. He said that Israel had failed to uphold its end of the nearly yearlong cease-fire by assassinating the leaders of other Palestinian factions that have continued attacks, and that it had not met other conditions of the truce. "For this reason the calmness has ended," Mr. Zahar said, sipping a cup of dark Arabic coffee. "We have the right to self-defense and to protect our people." Mr. Zahar said Israel's withdrawal from Gaza had vindicated Hamas's policy of violent attacks, including the use of suicide bombers. "They escaped from Gaza," he said of the Israeli withdrawal. "This was not an Israeli gift." But he appeared to have tempered his often fiery talk ahead of the elections, just as Hamas's military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has tempered its activity. He said "resistance is not about guns alone," and he cited the building of self-reliant industry and education as other forms of resisting Israeli control and making the Palestinians strong. He said that there could well be factional violence on Jan. 25 but that Hamas would work to avoid civil war, which many people in Gaza fear will follow elections. "The only winner would be Israel," he said. Mr. Zahar rejected what he described as recent efforts by Israel to draw a connection between Hamas and Al Qaeda. "Al Qaeda is not present here," he said. "We are focused on the occupation. We run no operations outside of Palestine, outside of the occupied territories, so we are completely different from Al Qaeda." Hamas's social programs in education and aid for the Palestinians' most fragile classes had demonstrated the faction's credentials to govern, and won it support as an organization that could be trusted to clean up a corrupt Palestinian Authority, he said. But "our project is not to replace Fatah with Hamas," he said. "Our project is to change the corrupted system, the corrupted regime, to purify the regime." During the course of the interview, the leader of the Palestinian Authority and of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, telephoned to ask Mr. Zahar what he thought of a speech Mr. Abbas gave Monday evening. "Great man!" Mr. Zahar bellowed when he answered the phone. He told Mr. Abbas the speech "was positive and acceptable." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 When are the Palestinian elections? |
| Posted by: Jake 2006-01-12 22:10 |
| #2 According to David Ignatius, editorialist for the Washington Post, Ehud Olmert is the architect of Ariel Sharon's consolidate-behind-the-wall policy. He writes , in today's Wall Street Journal (free, but registration req'd): Mr. Olmert played a trailblazing role three years ago in proposing a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank. At the time, Israelis were reeling from a failed peace process, a wave of suicide bombings and a growing sense of despair about the country's political future. Mr. Olmert argued in a November 2003 interview with Haaretz that to survive and prosper as a Jewish state, Israel must pull back from its settlements in Gaza and most of the West Bank. If Israel tried to hold on to the territories it occupied in the 1967 war, Jews would soon be outnumbered by Palestinians and Israel would lose its soul. Mr. Olmert didn't mince words in his 2003 interview: "There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve," he said. "In the absence of a negotiated agreement -- and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement -- we need to implement a unilateral alternative." Mr. Olmert stressed that to make disengagement work, Israel would have to pull back far enough to maintain an 80-20 ratio of Jews to Arabs within its borders, and that it would have to pull out of some Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. These were issues that Mr. Sharon fudged, to the day he was rushed to the hospital. And it's starting to look like an Olmert-lead Kadima will be the one to form the next government, despite the loss of Sharon. Voting Hamas into power will guarantee a quick end to Palestinian hopes for anything. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-01-12 22:06 |
| #1 Hamas's most prominent leader in Gaza and the West Bank, Mahmoud Zahar, said Wednesday that his faction would still refuse to recognize Israel or disarm even if it won in the Palestinian elections this month. Way to go, Zahar-baby. Continue to marginalize your cause. As you climb the ladder of international diplomacy, you're going to meet a lot of other people that dislike falling from their own particular heights. These people often dislike hamfisted violent thugs who are likely to bring the whole construct crashing down. Feel free to delude yourself in terms of how warm the welcome will be for a bunch of gun-toting genocidal gangsters in the midst of this tenuous framework. We'll patiently wait for your shock and surprise when all of your international aid packages shrivel and wither in the light of your adamant hatred. The slow poison you've spent decades secreting into Palestinian society is now attaining its cumulative effect. At your very moment of conquest, such bilious hatred and xenophobic mentality will only serve to isolate and quarrantine the festering scum you call "followers." Maybe then you'll finally realize that your fraternity of fellow Jew-hating hoodlums are going to be out in the cold while the future passes you by. Fear not, I'll not only wave as I go by. I'll also be sure to laugh and point. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-01-12 16:12 |