Hamas has blocked any chance of peace with Israel and Palestinians, and wouldn’t deny that, wouldn’t be offended by the statement, and would boast with pride that’s their reason for being.
Since the early 1990’s as the Canadian Correspondent based in Jerusalem, I interviewed Hamas leaders inside Gaza who swore only to destroy Israel.
At every turn they justified their attacks on civilians including bus bombings, saying Israel had started the conflict when it forced Palestinians into the Gaza refugee camp in 1948 when the Israeli State was formed. And until the modern day Israel is destroyed, Hamas won’t stop killing.
In 1994 when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was allowed after 27 yrs in exile to return to Palestinian areas after the OSLO Peace Accords, policing peace became one of the first challenges with Israel.
Israeli and Palestinian forces began joint patrols in Gaza, as part of the peace accords. I rode on those patrols as a reporter, a sign and symbol enemies could become friends.
But one of the first casualties of Hamas attacks were the joint patrols which quickly disappeared because of Palestinian’s who turned weapons on Israeli soldiers.
Hamas was jailed in large numbers by Arafat’s Fatah faction, because it refused to abide by the peace accords and worked to undermine the Palestinian authority. The Israeli Government of Yitzhak Rabin demanded the PA attack Hamas and stop the attacks it carried out using it’s military wing.
And the Palestinian glorification of suicide attacks and fiery assaults on Israel, were a subtext of the follow on OSLO 2 accords, but never implemented. Palestinian TV fed violence and glorified attacks by any and all Palestinian factions.
Hamas was still small, but growing and popular as the Palestinian Authority became plagued with corruption, and Hamas continued to win Palestinian’s by funding computer camps, pharmacies, and schools and other charities.
In June of 2007, Hamas made a move to oust Fatah, and in five days of fighting which included throwing fellow Palestinians to their deaths from rooftops, it took over Gaza.
If the peace process was stalled it went into cardiac arrest with Hamas’ takeover. Hamas refused to recognize the State of Israel, a core tenant of the OSLO accords. It refused to hold more elections and wanted to take over the West Bank from Fatah, increasing the threat to Israel.
Israel of course was a player in all of this. In the early days of Hamas, the Israeli;’s downplayed it’s Islamic roots, and even gave it financial support hopping to divide support for the PLO and Fatah.
Rather than strengthening the largely secular Fatah Group, Israel played one faction against another, and with no Israeli troops left in Gaza after a decision to pullout soldiers and settlers, how to rein in Hamas?
Hamas grew in military ferocity with the backing of Iran which suppled rocket know how and military training. Israeli again downplayed the risk, adopting a policy of every few years “of mowing the grass”, a term for limited confrontations with Hamas and degrading it’s arms including tunnels and weapons stores.
In the end it appear Israel believed Hamas had learned to live with only running and governing Gaza and was content to stay quiet.
Israel missed all the signs Hamas was a gathering storm, biding it’s time to attack and kill or kidnap Israeli’s.
And when Hamas showed itself, it was the old Hamas but better armed and trained in butchery of civilians. But still the old blood thirsty, no limits terror organization Israel knew so well, but failed to keep a closer eye on, distracted with Israeli leader Netanyahu’s internal political problems and violence spiking elsewhere in the West Bank, driven by settlement expansion.
So now Israel about to enter Gaza vows to disarm and remove Hamas from power.
But how? And who fills the power vacuum? It’s a monstrous challenge for the future of Palestinians, and Israeli’s.
Netanyahu has spent a career undermining peace efforts and ignoring the plight of Palestinians who might embrace a more peaceful 2 state solution. And now he has presided over the biggest intelligence failure in Israel’s history too.
And as the architects of the OSLO accords noted, if Israel doesn’t embrace peace with Palestinian’s it only breeds extremism and hate, and new waves of violence threatening the very survival of the Jewish state.
Oct 5 1995 - Yitzak Rabin Former P.M.
“We can continue to fight. We can continue to kill -- and continue to be killed. But we can also try to put a stop to this never-ending cycle of blood. We can also give peace a chance”.
Has the chance passed by Israel and the Palestinians? They seem so far from an end to the fighting, but sometimes the most bloody chapters lead to renewed appetite for ways to find peace.