While I applaud the efforts of US President Donald Trump in assembling a coalition of Western powers and Arab states in support of the ceasefire proposal currently under negotiation, we here in Israel must be honest with ourselves and not fall into the trap of believing the lies we tell ourselves.
I hope with every part of my being that the remaining hostages will be returned to us, that the war will end, that Hamas will be disarmed, and that the rebuilding of Gaza will begin for the benefit of those who remain there.
However, and there is always a however, Hamas will not disappear. Truth be told, there is simply no way to eliminate an idea that is based on religious fervor unless one eliminates every single person who believes in that idea which, of course, is simply impossible to achieve.
In the short term, Hamas may indeed release the hostages and abide by the conditions of the peace agreement. Yet history has taught us that they will eventually renege on the agreement and resume their Jihad against Israel. To think otherwise is really a case of believing our own lies. In a word, there is no chance whatsoever that Hamas will lay down its arms and start telling its people that they’re just going to have to live in peace with Israel.
All one has to do is look at the founding charter of Hamas, which contains a quote from Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna saying: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
Why Hamas will never give up
HAMAS WILL never abandon this objective because it is seen by them as a religious obligation. The war against Israel would rage on even if Israel were no larger than a single neighborhood. It will never be solved by negotiated settlements, for Hamas’s guiding principle is the Qur’anic command: “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). For believing Muslims, this is equivalent to their “torah” commanding them to act to destroy us.
Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center recently wrote: “The Land of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic caliphate, and before that by the Abbasid caliphate. As such, by the lights of Islamic theology, it belongs to Islam forever, and Muslims have a responsibility before Allah to drive out those infidels who rule this land now. That responsibility cannot be negotiated away, no matter how skillful the negotiator may be, or how favorable the terms of the proposed agreement.”
The result of this logic appears to be quite depressing and does not hold any hope for the future. That would be the conclusion of people who don’t understand the culture of this region of which we Jews have been a part since creation. But while we are “of” the culture here, we are not “in” the culture. Much like singer Theodore Bikel of blessed memory used to opine, “Jews have, for centuries, been in the mud but never of the mud.”
In seeking a positive spin. The talking heads in Washington might want to go back in history and look at the philosophy of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. While he was certainly no friend of Israel, he did have deep insight into the local culture that could be useful in the situation we now find ourselves.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2006, Kissinger wrote about the Hamas issue as follows: “Whatever happens, whoever governs Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the parties will be impelled by their closeness to one another to interact on a range of issues including crossing points, work permits and water usage. These de facto relationships might be shaped into some agreed international framework, in the process testing Hamas’s claims of a willingness to discuss a truce. A possible outcome of such an effort could be an interim agreement of indefinite duration.”
Kissinger was convinced that coming to a peace agreement between combatants in this part of the world is almost impossible. His logic was that peace means someone wins and someone loses. Muslim culture does not tolerate that very well if it is the Muslim country that is seen as the loser. Witness the fact that most Arab leaders are often seen in military uniforms intended to project strength and dominance.
RATHER, TO stop the bloodshed, it would be more realistic to negotiate a long-term truce for 25 or 50 years which would then be renegotiated by the next generation of leaders. That way, there is no shame related to loss.
That may be the only long-term path forward that also recognizes the futility of trying to eliminate an idea represented by a terrorist entity like Hamas.
This concept of the “liberation” of Palestine from the Jews’ being an “obligation incumbent upon all Muslims,” an “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” remains rooted in Islam’s theology of Jihad. This obligation remains in the minds of those who support Hamas and its continuing struggle against our being here.
After all, even in the midst of the current negotiations, it was reported that Hamas has been seeking the release of some of the most notorious Palestinian terrorists whom we do not want to set free as we know many of them will return to their effort to destroy us. That demand alone is a proof statement that their long-term intent is to continue the fight regardless of what may be agreed to today.
While we may have no choice but to accept the agreement being brokered by the West and their Arab partners, at a minimum we need to remain vigilant and understand that this may very well be just one more attempt to solve the unsolvable. Our leadership will need to make sure that their vision is crystal clear regarding future life with our belligerent neighbors.
The writer, an international business development consultant, is the founder and chair of the American State Offices Association, a former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, and a past chairperson of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.