“There is such a stench of defeatism in the air”

Deja Vu – Again

The Jerusalem Report
Amiel Ungar

Baseball hall-of-famer Yogi Berra’s immortal tautology, “It’s deja vu all over again” aptly describes the attempt to “spin” a silver lining out of an entire storm cloud – the Gaza takeover by Hamas. To believe Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Hamas’s masked gunmen strutting through Gaza are actually heralds of peace. Rewind to 1991, when Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement were at low ebb, the first intifada was petering out and Arafat had intuitively, but mistakenly, backed Saddam Hussein and his invasion of Kuwait. Israeli peace advocates felt that such perfidy actually presented an irretrievable opportunity to strike a deal with the Fatah-PLO leader and the then-illegal talks leading to Oslo gathered momentum.

When Oslo came out of the closet and made it to the Knesset, the selling of Arafat began. Unlike Israel, Arafat the arch-terrorist would be able to fight terror without the restrictions of a High Court of Justice or the complaints of human-rights activists, then- prime minister Yitzhak Rabin argued. Arafat, of course, did precisely the opposite. Rabin’s promise to the Israeli public that, if the Palestinians squandered the opportunity, they would pay the price was conveniently expunged from his “legacy.”

We are back at the same pass and now it is the Olmert government which seeks to snap up Fatah stock at bargain prices, following the organization’s disgraceful showing in Gaza. Off we go to Sharm al- Sheikh to obsequiously thank host Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose forces did nothing to stop the flow of arms and funding across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza. It is the season, it seems, to re inflate Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, who chose to ride the Hamas tiger until he was partially eaten.

Other elements of the remake may soon follow. A concerted media effort is underway to free the recidivist Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti, whom our peace processors affectionately refer to as “Marwan.” Meretz leader Yossi Beilin cheerfully admitted that Barghouti, currently serving five consecutive life sentences, epitomized the post-Oslo war and the murderous targeting of Israeli citizens. However, in the weightless atmosphere of peace efforts such heavy baggage hardly makes an impression on the scale. Barghouti, explains Beilin, felt that he had to enter the terror sweepstakes to effectively compete with Hamas. This explains the mindset of our putative allies. When cornered by Hamas forces in Gaza, the Fatah loyalists pleaded, “Stop shooting, we are not Jews.” The corollary of that statement should be patently obvious.

Barghouti and thousands of others will go free to bolster Abbas. The Fatah-aligned al-Aqsa terrorists will be “merged” with the Palestinian security forces and protection-racket patriots like Zakaria Zbeida in Jenin will soon be sporting their new American weaponry and armored cars. We have seen and paid in blood for all this before.

The second time around is worse and not merely because we should be wiser. The original Oslo disaster issued mainly from intellectual arrogance, but it was also buoyed by misplaced idealism. In the current remake, political cynicism and defeatism are the watchwords. Unlike 19th-century U.S. presidential candidate Henry Clay, who famously declared, “I would rather be right than be president,” Ehud Olmert would rather be wrong, as long as he remains prime minister. The price for Olmert’s continued tenure was set by Minister of Infrastructure Binyamin (Fuad) Ben Eliezer, fresh from securing his friend Ehud Barak’s election as Labor party chairman. Fuad bartered hooking up illegally built Arab houses to the electricity grid in return for Arab electoral support. Entire villages voted for Barak in proportions which would have made even Syria’s Bashar Asad blush.

Fuad is currently gearing up for another grand bargain. In a recent television interview, he predicted that if Olmert launches a full-blown peace process, it would effectively immunize him against the “Winograd Effect.” In other words, if, in its final report, the Winograd Commission, set up to examine the conduct of the 2006 Lebanon War, explicitly recommends Olmert’s ouster, the people and the media (not necessarily in that order) will refuse to dispense with Olmert, the paragon of peace. Labor and Fuad will then be able to yield gracefully to a manipulated vox populi and remain in the government (despite Barak’s pledge to quit unless Olmert resigns) rather than precipitate elections that would almost certainly bring Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu to power.
There is a stench of defeatism in the air. Peace negotiations represent the default option for a government that has tolerated the shelling of Sderot and its transformation into a ghost town. It watches passively as Iran helps Hamas replicate the Hizballah model complete with tunnels and missiles in Gaza. The leaders who razed Jewish communities there, while promising a devastating reply to any provocation from the Strip, now vainly place their hopes on international forces and even on Mahmud Abbas.

Negotiations with Abbas and the unreformed Fatah are futile and self-destructive. But if there are to be negotiations, the last people we need to represent us are Olmert and his crew. A negotiator constantly thinking of saving his political skin holds a weak hand. A negotiating team self-programmed to believe it has no alternative will make the wrong choices.

Contributing editor Amiel Ungar is a foreign affairs columnist for the Makor Rishon weekly and political columnist for the national religious monthly Nekuda.