Uri Avnery writes about the latest threat to the state of Israel:
Forget the Qassams. Forget the mortar shells. They are nothing compared with what Hamas launched at us this week:
The chief of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, has approached an Israeli newspaper and proposed a cease-fire. No more Qassams, no more mortars, no suicide bombings, no Israeli military incursions into the Strip, no "targeted liquidations" of leaders. A total cease-fire. And not only in the Gaza Strip, but in the West Bank, too. ...
Generals in uniform and out of uniform, military correspondents, political correspondents, commentators of all stripes and genders, politicians from left and right - all are attacking the Haniyeh offer.
The message is: it must not be accepted under any circumstances! It should not even be considered! On the contrary: the offer shows that Hamas is about to break, and therefore the war against it must be intensified, the blockade on Gaza must be tightened, more leaders must be killed - indeed, why not kill Haniyeh himself? What are we waiting for?
A paradox inherent in the conflict since its beginning is at work here: if the Palestinians are strong, it is dangerous to make peace with them. If they are weak, there is no need to make peace with them. Either way, they must be broken.
This really is a vexing problem for Israel. As I've written before, Israel funded Hamas beginning in the late 1970s to be an extreme counterbalance to the more accommodating PLO, with the hope (in part) that Hamas would refuse to participate at all in the peace process—thus making it possible for Israel to continue indefinitely its enterprise of stealing Palestinian land. But in recent years Hamas has shown itself to be just as unreliable as the PLO in maintaining the desired rejectionist stance.
So once again, the Israelis are left without a true partner for peace-avoidance on the Palestinian side who can help them advance their colonial project. It wouldn't be surprising if there's a push within the Israeli government to find, fund, or found yet another Palestinian group—but this time they'll need to make sure there's no chance that it will go all wishy-washy and peace-lovey on them as the rest have. They need something solid and dependable. Like, say, the Palestinian Al-Qaeda Terror Cohort for the Second Holocaust and Terror Annihilation of Israel Terror Terror Terror.
But with Israel's luck, in another decade or so we'd just see a press release from the PAQTCSHTAITTT renouncing violence and calling for negotiations on a final settlement. That's ok, though. As the Israeli government clearly understands, the great work of peace-avoidance is never completed; it's a journey, not a destination.
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