Hamas’s Feat Is a Full Victory

After Abu Mazen’s feat at the UN General Assembly, which left Netanyahu and his delegation of Israeli gangsters seething with anger, some Palestinian voices rose to criticize him. And when Hamas achieved a rare resounding victory, in swapping 1027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli captive, there also were Palestinian voices that rose to criticize the deal. President Mahmoud Abbas scored a victory last month, and Hamas scored a victory this month. The critics, be they Palestinians or other Arabs, will perhaps reconsider their unjustified negative positions when they see that in both times, they were in agreement with ultra-extremist Israelis in both Israel and the United States, in terms of criticizing Abu Mazen and Hamas, sometimes even appearing as though they were drawing on the vocabulary of the settlers. The best commentary on the deal I read in the Israeli press was a piece written by the usually moderate commentator Nahum Barnea […] in Yedioth Ahronoth. He said that Israel lost the battle because the Israelis proved to the Palestinians that they can get a lot from Israel by means of force, but nothing by means of cooperation. Barnea also said that the deal entails major security risks to Israel. In the same paper, on the same day, another commentator was describing the freed Palestinian prisoners as a "bunch of murderers", something that was echoed throughout the commentaries of Israeli and American Likudnik extremists, who called the prisoners terrorists. But the only terrorists in the Middle East are the members of the fascist Israeli government, the occupation soldiers and the criminal settlers. Yet there is another type of terrorism, namely that of organizations like al-Qaeda. However, I hold Israel solely responsible for this. Were it not for the occupation and its crimes, no terrorism would have been spawned in response, and justified by its perpetrators by invoking Israel’s acts. By contrast, the prisoners who were released in exchange for Gilad Shalit are heroes of national liberation, and so are the approximately six thousand Palestinians, who remain in Israeli jails, while justice cries out to heaven for revenge against a neo-Nazi government and its continued occupation, theft of homes, and killings in Israel and beyond. I will not take the reader further into a labyrinth of numbers and figures, but I only want to focus on one indisputable aspect thereof. Since 29/9/2009, around 1500 Palestinian minors were killed, i.e. below 15 years of age, compared to 135 Israeli children. The ratio of one to ten is a Nazi ratio par excellence. This is while I hope that the reader bears in mind that the Palestinian resistance, including in its suicide attacks, is unorganized, and is carried out by individuals with little to no training, and so they are expected to make mistakes in choosing their targets. On the other hand, the Israeli army led by neo-Nazis is very well trained, as everyone attests to it. If the Israeli army kills a child then it probably does so deliberately, unlike a Palestinian resistance fighter who goes out ‘on the blind’ to avenge his country and his family. Hamas has achieved a major victory through the prisoner swap deal, and we congratulate its leadership and thank Egypt for its role in facilitating it. It does not detract from the significance of Hamas's victory that its leadership was quick to approve a deal that was offered to it in the past and that it had rejected, in order to restore its popular standing after Abu Mazen’s feat at the UN and the global spotlight that he came into thereafter. For even if this is true, Hamas's achievement remains a full victory in the ongoing battle with Israel. Today, I read that the Quarter wants to meet with the Palestinians and the Israelis, each separately, next Wednesday, to push them towards resuming negotiations. But I believe that negotiations with the Netanyahu government are futile, and that all what the U.S. administration wants is to halt the Palestinian bid in the UN Security Council to avoid embarrassment for President Barack Obama before the Arabs and Muslims, by using the U.S. veto power. The Arabs, especially the Palestinians, are masters when it comes to turning victory into defeat, so caution is a must. khazen@alhayat.com