Extra! September/October 2006
Nixed Signals When Hamas hinted at peace, U.S. media wouldn't take the message
By Seth Ackerman
After the June 25 capture of one of its soldiers in a raid by Hamas militants, Israel responded with a massive invasion of Gaza. It destroyed the area's electrical generators, blew up bridges and launched a barrage of artillery at Palestinian camps and settlements. Palestinian fighters vowed steadfast resistance. Whatever meager hopes remained for peace talks, cease-fires or an improvement in the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza seemed to have evaporated. Israel was demanding the unconditional release of the soldier, while leaders of Hamas—in control of the Palestinian government following the January 2006 elections—insisted he would be returned only in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
For the U.S. news-consuming public, hopes for a durable halt to Israeli/ Palestinian violence must have seemed even slimmer than the stand-off over the captured soldier might have led one to believe. For U.S. news outlets were informing their readers that Hamas was not merely an armed group holding a hostage as a bargaining chip. It was a terrorist faction "sworn to Israel's destruction" (Boston Globe, 6/26/06) that "refuses to recognize Israel" (Baltimore Sun, 6/27/06). "Sworn to Israel's destruction," a New York Daily News editorial explained (6/29/06), "Hamas has made a pariah of the Palestinian government." "The group, sworn to Israel's destruction, has refused international calls to renounce violence or recognize Israel's right to exist," wrote the Associated Press (6/29/06).
To Americans all too accustomed to watching the intractable Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from afar, a kidnapped soldier might have seemed, in itself, to be a manageable problem. But as long as Israel was faced with a Palestinian government in the hands of a group that "refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight, not talk," as Philadelphia Inquirer foreign affairs analyst Trudy Rubin put it (7/7/06), what option did Israel have besides all-out war? How could Israel negotiate with a group unalterably committed to its destruction?
"Not a prisoner of dogmas"
Americans had been hearing this message since long before Hamas' January victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. Established in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Egypt-based Muslim Brother- hood movement, Hamas from the very start staked out a position of uncompromising militancy in the fight against Israel. Adopting a blatantly anti-Semitic founding charter that cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and explicitly rejects a peaceful solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it denounced the 1993 Oslo Accords and refused to participate in the Palestinian political system established in the wake of the agreement. Most notoriously, it was known for its gruesome suicide attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli civilians, especially after the start of the Second Intifada in late 2000.
Throughout the 1990s, Hamas functioned to a large extent as a hardline underground Palestinian opposition movement, frequently lashing out against Israel in order to discredit Yassir Arafat's ruling Fatah party, which kept a firm and authoritarian grip on Palestinian politics. On countless occasions, peace moves between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority were undermined by Hamas violence. These attacks were motivated not only by a desire to capitalize on public disillusionment with the Arafat-led peace process, but by anger at Hamas' political marginalization at the hands of old-guard Fatah apparatchiks.
Yet analysts also saw the potential for far-reaching change in Hamas' political outlook. As early as 2000, a study by Israel's leading academic specialists on Hamas (Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas) cautioned that the Islamist group, despite its fanatical image, "is not a prisoner of its own dogmas. It does not shut itself behind absolute truths, nor does it subordinate its activities and decisions to the officially held religious doctrine."
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