All of the points that Jeffrey Goldberg makes here (about the advantage to Hamas of being a non-state actor, about Hamas baiting Israel into killing Gazan civilians, about the connection between antisemitism and opposition to Israel) are good ones. But I think this one is worthy of note:
Israel’s political leadership has done little in recent years to make their cause seem appealing. It is impossible to convince a Judeophobe that Israel can do anything good or useful, short of collective suicide. But there are millions of people of good will across the world who look at the decision-making of Israel’s government and ask themselves if this is a country doing all it can do to bring about peace and tranquility in its region. Hamas is a theocratic fascist cult committed to the obliteration of Israel. But it doesn’t represent all Palestinians. Polls [see here] suggest that it may very well not represent all of the Palestinians in Gaza. There is a spectrum of Palestinian opinion, just as there is a spectrum of Jewish opinion.
I don’t know if the majority of Palestinians would ultimately agree to a two-state solution. But I do know that Israel, while combating the extremists, could do a great deal more to buttress the moderates. This would mean, in practical terms, working as hard as possible to build wealth and hope on the West Bank. A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions. Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel’s sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates.
Israel needs to be doing everything in its power to drive a wedge between Hamas and the mass of Palestinians. While military action against Hamas is now the priority, there are ways of doing this which employ carrots as well as sticks. I sometimes wonder if Israel’s leaders understand that.
And while I’m still not certain exactly what transpired in Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to achieve a ceasefire (that seems to be in dispute), it’s clear that it was badly mishandled. Goldberg writes:
Kerry’s recent efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have come to nothing in part because his proposals treat Hamas as a legitimate organization with legitimate security needs, as opposed to a group listed by Kerry’s State Department as a terror organization devoted to the physical elimination of one of America’s closest allies…
I’m not sure why Kerry’s proposals for a ceasefire seem to indulge the organization that initiated this current war. Perhaps because Kerry may be listening more to Qatar, which is Hamas’s primary funder, than he is listening to the Jordanians, Emiratis, Saudis, and Egyptians, all of whom oppose Hamas to an equivalent or greater degree than does their ostensible Israeli adversary.
