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Extra! September/October 2006

Nixed Signals When Hamas hinted at peace, U.S. media wouldn’t take the message

By Seth Ackerman

After the June 25 capture of one of its soldiers in a raid by Hamas
militants, Israel responded with a massive invasion of Gaza. It
destroyed the area’s electrical generators, blew up bridges and
launched a barrage of artillery at Palestinian camps and settlements.
Palestinian fighters vowed steadfast resistance. Whatever meager
hopes remained for peace talks, cease-fires or an improvement in the
already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza seemed to have
evaporated. Israel was demanding the unconditional release of the
soldier, while leaders of Hamas—in control of the Palestinian
government following the January 2006 elections—insisted he would be
returned only in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

For the U.S. news-consuming public, hopes for a durable halt to
Israeli/ Palestinian violence must have seemed even slimmer than the
stand-off over the captured soldier might have led one to believe.
For U.S. news outlets were informing their readers that Hamas was not
merely an armed group holding a hostage as a bargaining chip. It was
a terrorist faction “sworn to Israel’s destruction” (Boston Globe,
6/26/06) that “refuses to recognize Israel” (Baltimore Sun, 6/27/06).
“Sworn to Israel’s destruction,” a New York Daily News editorial
explained (6/29/06), “Hamas has made a pariah of the Palestinian
government.” “The group, sworn to Israel’s destruction, has refused
international calls to renounce violence or recognize Israel’s right
to exist,” wrote the Associated Press (6/29/06).

To Americans all too accustomed to watching the intractable Israeli/
Palestinian conflict from afar, a kidnapped soldier might have
seemed, in itself, to be a manageable problem. But as long as Israel
was faced with a Palestinian government in the hands of a group that
“refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight, not talk,” as
Philadelphia Inquirer foreign affairs analyst Trudy Rubin put it
(7/7/06), what option did Israel have besides all-out war? How could
Israel negotiate with a group unalterably committed to its destruction?

“Not a prisoner of dogmas”

Americans had been hearing this message since long before Hamas’
January victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. Established
in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Egypt-based Muslim Brother-
hood movement, Hamas from the very start staked out a position of
uncompromising militancy in the fight against Israel. Adopting a
blatantly anti-Semitic founding charter that cites The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion and explicitly rejects a peaceful solution to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it denounced the 1993 Oslo Accords and
refused to participate in the Palestinian political system
established in the wake of the agreement. Most notoriously, it was
known for its gruesome suicide attacks that claimed the lives of
hundreds of Israeli civilians, especially after the start of the
Second Intifada in late 2000.

Throughout the 1990s, Hamas functioned to a large extent as a
hardline underground Palestinian opposition movement, frequently
lashing out against Israel in order to discredit Yassir Arafat’s
ruling Fatah party, which kept a firm and authoritarian grip on
Palestinian politics. On countless occasions, peace moves between
Israel and the Palestinian National Authority were undermined by
Hamas violence. These attacks were motivated not only by a desire to
capitalize on public disillusionment with the Arafat-led peace
process, but by anger at Hamas’ political marginalization at the
hands of old-guard Fatah apparatchiks.

Yet analysts also saw the potential for far-reaching change in Hamas’
political outlook. As early as 2000, a study by Israel’s leading
academic specialists on Hamas (Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The
Palestinian Hamas) cautioned that the Islamist group, despite its
fanatical image, “is not a prisoner of its own dogmas. It does not
shut itself behind absolute truths, nor does it subordinate its
activities and decisions to the officially held religious doctrine.”

[…]

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