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I am beyond words:

Some of the Palestinian gunmen who participated in the kidnapping of IDF soldier Cpl. Gilad Schalit last year have long been on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian sources revealed Sunday.

The sources named two of the suspected kidnappers as Muhammad Azmi Farawneh and Majdi Tayseer Hammad…

Farawneh is believed to have played a key role in the abduction of Schalit. Hammad was the commander of the Nasser Salah Eddin Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees – one of the groups that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.

The two were killed a few weeks after the abduction in air strikes launched by the IAF in the Gaza Strip.

The fact that they have been on the payroll of the PA was disclosed after their families protested against the low pension that the PA has decided to allocate them…

The PA has also been paying salaries to thousands of Fatah gunmen belonging to the faction’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades. The majority of these gunmen are registered as members of various branches of the PA security forces, particularly the General Intelligence, Force 17 and the Preventive Security Service. But until now it was not common knowledge that members of the Popular Resistance Committees had also been receiving salaries from the PA.

The Popular Resistance Committees is an alliance of various armed factions in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The group was also behind the roadside bomb attack that killed three US security guards in the northern Gaza Strip in 2003.

— Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post

The US continues to funnel millions of dollars and large quantities of arms to the PA to pay the salaries of these ‘security’ forces and to ‘strengthen Palestinian moderates’.

My tax dollars are arming and paying terrorists to kidnap and murder Israelis and Americans!

Technorati Tags: Palestinians

Ze’ev Schiff, respected military correspondent for Ha’aretz, writes:

Israel is experiencing something in Sderot that it has not experienced since the War of Independence, if ever: The enemy has silenced an entire city and brought normal life there to a halt. The despair of Sderot’s mayor is one sign of what is happening. The sight of the town’s elderly residents returning from a “rest and relaxation” trip and refusing to alight from the bus and go home is additional proof that what is happening in Sderot is a national disgrace.

Schiff adds that the defeat in Sderot is “a serious national failure, which in my opinion is worse than the failure of the Second Lebanon War”.

Unlike the US, Israel’s parliamentary system allows for a simple majority vote of the Knesset to force the government to resign and bring about early elections. How can the government which lost both the Lebanon War and the battle of Sderot, whose Prime Minister had an approval rating of 3% among the public, and which is now talking about beginning negotiations to return the Golan to Syria while Syria prepares for war — how can this government remain in power?

The explanation is two-fold. First, new elections would result in many current Knesset members being removed, and they would prefer to keep their seats. Second, apparently not enough members are convinced that there is a better alternative.

The problem is that the government has lost its ability to lead the people, any respect that it may have had in the international arena, and its power of deterrence over Israel’s enemies. It’s time for democracy to do its work, and the political chips must fall where they may.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Sderot

Brit Tzedek v’Shalom (BTvS), the “Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace” wishes to promote dialogue among American Jews about US policy towards Israel.

National Advocacy Chair Diane Balser has published a manifesto called “‘Let’s Talk!’ Wrestling with the Conversation about Israel“.

There are almost as many points along the political spectrum about Israel as there are Jews. Most (but certainly not all) of these represent positions that are pro-Israel, although they may have very disparate areas of emphasis and promote entirely different strategies. BTvS claims to be in this part of the spectrum, but there is much in Balser’s manifesto that I found disturbing, and which brings this claim into question.

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Is Hamas going soft?

Palestinian group Hamas is sending some “not unhelpful” signals about the Middle East peace process but should be clearer on where it stands, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview broadcast on [al-Jazeera] Friday — YNet

Blair did not make a specific reference, but:

The Palestinians are united in seeking a state in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, a senior Hamas leader said in an unusually enthusiastic endorsement of an idea the extremist Islamic movement long opposed.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a deputy to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal (residing in Damascus), made the comment in an interview published Saturday in the Hamas-linked newspaper “Palestine.”

Hamas was founded on a pledge to seek Israel’s destruction, but some in the movement have softened their stance as part of coalition talks with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chariman Mahmoud Abbas. The Hamas-Fatah government’s platform calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the lands Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War.

In the coalition talks, Hamas had presented its acquiescence to the idea as a major concession.

However, in his interview, Abu Marzouk presented a state alongside Israel as an achievement for the Palestinians.

“Now there is one team, one program, one united government … so there is a big chance to reach the goal we agreed upon at this stage, which is a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem,” he said. [my emphasis] — Jerusalem Post

Is there indeed anything new here? Only in a public relations sense.

Hamas has traditionally favored the total replacement of Israel by a Palestinian state. Here is Abu Marzouk last December:

It is not impossible, Abu Marzouk, emphasized, to establish a viable state on the whole territory of Palestine from the river (Jordan) to the (Mediterranean) sea. Not thinking to establish the state in that form represented the first mistake by the PLO when it thought that Palestine could accommodate two states. As to Hamas’s approach, it states that Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians have a historical right in Palestine, and that all Palestinians must be able to return to their homeland . — Ikhwanweb.com (Muslim Brotherhood website)

Arafat’s PLO did suggest, for public consumption, that it would accept a state alongside Israel and end the conflict, although on terms that were always designed to be unacceptable to Israel, such as inclusion of a right of return for refugees and their descendants to Israel, full control of East Jerusalem, etc. However, there is plenty of evidence that the intent of Arafat and the PLO leadership was to consider any Palestinian state that did not stretch from the river to the sea as an intermediate stage, a platform that would make the final re-conquest possible.

The Hamas leadership, unlike Arafat, does not generally lie about their goals, but relies on indirection and Western/Israeli wishful thinking to distract attention from them. So note Abu Marzouk’s inclusion of the phrase “at this stage” in the first quotation above, which I interpret to mean that Hamas would view a Palestinian state in the territories as temporary, and not an end to the conflict.

And indeed, in the Muslim Brotherhood article Abu Marzouk also said,

Even if a Palestinian state comes into existence this doesn’t mean that Israel has become legitimate, because there remain rights for the Palestinians that they must restore, notably the right to return to their homes.

An even more explict statement was made by Hamas co-founder and Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar in July of 2005:

Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, al-Zahar said Hamas would “definitely not” be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders.

“It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth.” —YNet

It’s highly unlikely that Hamas has suddenly taken a 180-degree turn and is now even more moderate than Arafat’s PLO, actually prepared to offer peace in return for a state in the territories.

Rather, the statement seems to say that Hamas will go along with its other coalition partners in seeking a state alongside Israel — as a ‘stage’, a short-term goal. It does not negate the longer-term aim, expressed in the Hamas covenant, of replacing Israel with an Arab state.

Technorati Tags: Hamas, Israel, Abu Marzouk