It is, after all, about the land
It is, as far as the Israelis are concerned, again about Hamas; just like it’s been even since the Islamist movement caused a landslide upset in the ’06 Palestinian election. And, going by precedent, it matters little whether or not Hamas was behind the abduction and murder of three Israeli citizens, or if the killings really pushed Israel to retaliatory action. The talks have been frozen for some time now. The EU is never a lever without US leadership. And the US has not been playing its usual part ever since Barak Obama took office. Indeed, in a rarest spectacle in international politics, Netanyahu actually openly campaigned for Mitt Romney, trying what-not to unseat the incumbent in another country.
Then Bibi (Netanyahu) wouldn’t talk to Abbas (of Fatah) because he did not represent Hamas, and therefore the entire Gaza strip. Now he won’t talk to Abbas because Hamas-Fatah unity implies taking a militant organisation board; hence still no cigar. He might consider talking again, he says, once Fatah dumps Hamas, again. And so the pendulum keeps swinging. But for all of Israel’s aggression and excesses, its land-grabbing and brutal murders, the Palestinians too have failed to address their people’s grievances in any way possible; right from the early PLO days to the new calculus, from the optimism of Oslo-Madrid to the failure to unite their insular clans.
A big part of the problem is that neither Hamas’s central command nor Israel’s own growing hard-line extreme-right lobby are OK with a mundane settlement of borders that suits neither’s idealistic goals and ambitions. They are, instead, bent upon complete destruction of the enemy. And that is the principal problem. Kidnappings, killings, summary executions and outright land and air invasions are so common in this pitiless, zero-sum game of Israeli-Palestinian politics because the war is about the land, not just victory. The Palestinians, monsters and animals to the outside world for so long, resort to violence because Israel’s self-victimising rhetoric finds a far more eager audience than their Naqba (catastrophe) true stories. And Israel’s violence gets far softer treatment. But so long as their land is not returned, Hamas will keep surfacing in one form or another. That is the simple fact of the two-state solution.
