What a unity
government bringing together Hamas with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas’ Fatah party means
Some major turning points in the lives of nations
announce their importance in plain sight, in front of TV cameras, while the
whole world is watching, for example: Sept. 11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall
come to mind. Others happen in secret. And still others try to slink away from
the lights while clothed in the drab, everyday disguise of bureaucratic
double-speak, as happened at a State Department press conference in Washington on Monday, at which a reporter wondered how America, once
the leader of a global war on terrorism, would respond to the announcement of a
Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, which the State
Department has clearly and repeatedly designated as a global terrorist
organization.
“Based on what we know now,” State Department
spokesperson Jen Psaki told the press, “we intend to work with this
government,” adding that “if needed” the United States might “recalibrate our
approach.” Hidden beneath this deliberately boring verbiage was a shocking
change in American foreign policy: Instead of making war on terrorists, America
would henceforth be directly funding one of the largest and most deadly
terrorist armies in the world.
Israel denounced the United
States for accepting Abbas’ government, but many of the reporters in the room
found nothing all that shocking in Psaki’s announcement. That’s not entirely
their fault. Generations of American diplomats working on the Arab-Israeli
conflict have been motivated by the conviction that there’s nothing to be
lost—and plenty to be gained—by trying to make peace between the two sides.
What harm could there be in getting the two sides in the same room to feel each
other out, to explore possibilities and find common ground? Certainly that was
the idea that inspired Secretary of State John Kerry, compelling him to make
dozens of trips to Jerusalem and Ramallah over the past two years.
Yet Psaki’s announcement is, in fact, shocking.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ move on Monday to bring Hamas
into a unity government with his own Fatah party means that U.S. taxpayers will
be paying the salaries of men and women who belong to an organization sworn to
the destruction of an American ally—and who repeatedly endorse and employ the
murder of innocent civilians through the grim arsenal of terror as a means of
achieving their goals. It is hard to imagine any significant number of
Americans who would endorse blowing up women and children on buses, or sending
shrapnel-laden suicide bombers into pizza parlors and discos, or sending
volleys of rockets against kindergartens—let alone would want their tax money
to wind up in the pockets of people who dream up and carry out such atrocities.
How did this happen? After all, it was Washington that
invented the Palestinian Authority, The purpose of the PA was to placate
America’s Arab partners, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while ensuring that the
remaining regional troublemakers—from Saddam Hussein to the Islamic Republic of
Iran—would be unable to use the Palestinian cause to their advantage. Moreover,
it was believed that the easiest way to neutralize Yasser Arafat and the PLO
was to suffocate him in a warm American embrace that would reward the scruffy
old terrorist for good behavior, and hold out the promise of a late-life
transformation into the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.
It came as a shock to
American policymakers that Arafat didn’t want to be Mandela; he wanted to be
Saladdin, and if he couldn’t free Jerusalem with fire and blood he would rather
die trying than go down in history as the traitor who relinquished the dream of
a Palestinian homeland, the way that the Palestinians—not the
Americans—imagined it.
Arafat was a hard case. But now the United States has
been outfoxed by Mahmoud Abbas, a dull 79-year-old bureaucrat who is also
regularly proclaimed to be “a man of peace” but who displays little interest in
any aspect of governance besides collecting tribute from Western powers and
daring them to call his bluff. In Abbas’ view, the Americans and the Israelis
are not in control; he is. Without him, the White House loses control of the peace
process, which is a key part of the American diplomatic patrimony in the
region—an asset that the Obama Administration can ill afford to lose,
especially now.
Abbas is therefore gambling that the Obama Administration
will continue to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to whatever he
proclaims to be the new Palestinian government. The White House is desperate,
and so it doesn’t matter that including Hamas in a government is against the
letter of U.S. law—indeed, a number of U.S. laws.
The 2006 Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, for instance, prohibits any U.S. funds from going to
Hamas, Hamas-controlled entities, or a power-sharing PA government that
includes Hamas as a member, or results from an agreement with Hamas. Most
recently, the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act prohibits “assistance to
Hamas or any entity effectively controlled by Hamas, any power-sharing
government of which Hamas is member, or that results from an agreement with
Hamas and over which Hamas exercises undue influence.”
That last clause regarding “undue influence,” say some
analysts, represents a loophole the administration may try to crawl through.
“The White House may argue that since Abbas is still president of the PA, and
since there aren’t really that many new Hamas members in the cabinet, Hamas
does not have ‘undue influence,’ ” says a senior official at a Washington-based
pro-Israel organization. “But if that’s true, then why won’t the new PA cabinet
disarm Hamas?”
That’s not going to happen, of course. One purpose of the
deal is for Fatah to protect Hamas’ arsenal, which, so long as it’s pointed at
Israel, will enhance the prestige of a PA president whose term in office was
over five years ago, and who has failed at both the small-bore work of ending
corruption, fixing roads, and providing real jobs for his people, as well as
big-picture tasks like winning his people a state. Protecting the weapons of
his rival, in other words, is all that Abbas has left to offer the Palestinians
and that suits Hamas fine.
“If anyone expects Hamas to hand over its missile network
to the PA, he’s making a big mistake,” said one Hamas
official. The reality is that Fatah has embraced Hamas.
Hamas has plenty to gain from the deal. Without the
Iranian assistance that Hamas once enjoyed, what Gaza’s Islamic resistance
needs most is some relief on the Egyptian side of the border. Cairo’s new
ruler, Sisi, can afford to be magnanimous with Hamas, especially if it means he
will inherit the Palestinian file in toto. Indeed, some Palestinians hope that Sisi will
choose to confront Israel. In short, Palestinian reconciliation is good for
everyone—except the United States and Israel.
The results for Israel are likely to be particularly
unpleasant. Both Bush and Obama White Houses boasted that the security
cooperation between Israel and the PA was excellent. But that seems over now
since there is reportedly a clause in
the Palestinian unity agreement that “criminalizes” security coordination with
Israel. Perhaps, as many have feared over the last decade, those U.S.-trained
Palestinian security forces will now turn their American weapons on an American
ally, as they did during the second intifada. More such attacks will certainly
follow, and some of them will be more successful—whether perpetrated directly
by Hamas, or by Fatah, or some new terror entity in which both parties
cooperate together.
Meanwhile, as crazy as it sounds, U.S. diplomats will continue
searching for loopholes that allow us to fund officially designated terrorist
organizations with taxpayer dollars. As Jonathan Schanzer, director of research
at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains “there are waivers
embedded in the legislation, with which the president can override stipulations
for reasons of national security or national interest. The assumption,” says
Schanzer, “is that Obama is going to override everything.”
The administration will also be able to cite a regional precedent
for its likely next step of embracing the new Palestinian “unity government” as
a “partner for peace” while claiming that America is not funding terrorism.
Hamas officials boast that they are
now employing the “Hezbollah model”—i.e., becoming a political party that
avoids responsibility for governance, while also maintaining an independent
military organization that engages in terrorism. In other words, the PA will
serve as legitimate cover while the Islamic resistance continues to wage its
war of liberation against Israel.
The Palestinian Authority is an entity created by the
United States, and it cannot exist without massive U.S. financial, political,
military, and diplomatic support. Rather than finding ways around American law,
the Obama Administration should be looking for ways to snap Abbas’ spine.
If
Kerry’s assiduous and careless peace processing was evidence of the
administration’s incompetence, the decision to work with Hamas is evidence of
the White House’s cravenness. The bill for this moral rot will be paid by
Israelis—and by American taxpayers who will now be directly covering the salaries
of thousands of card-carrying members of a terrorist organization. It’s not
just Obama who will be crossing a red line by funding Hamas—he’s dragging the
rest of us along with him into a political and moral
swamp, in which America will combat terrorism with one hand, while paying for
terror with the other.
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