Dissenting Neighbours
It's easy enough to understand what Fatah and Hamas gain out of the Mecca Accord. They've made a bargain with one another to combine forces for the good of the people whom they serve, as opposed to setting their forces against one another in bloody internecine combat which they've thus far engaged in to the greater detriment of that same cause. Mahmoud Abbas, who resolutely insisted that any deal the two would reach would have to include recognition of the State of Israel, had his resolve dissolve out from under him.Both Fatah and Abbas urgently required positions of prestige and power within the Palestinian Authority. Fatah had it in spades, but let it slip through their corrupt fingers. As a reward to Fatah the Palestinian people took their democratic prerogative and gave command to Hamas which had demonstrated a civic capability that Fatah had failed to produce despite ample opportunity and absconded funds. Nothing ever seems quite so precious as what was once yours and is now someone else's.
Which observation informs the position of Fatah/Hamas fully as much as it does that of the Palestinian population who mourn the loss of a portion of their ancestral homeland to the aspirational nationalism of another group who celebrated the gain of a portion of their ancestral homeland. It's never an easy matter for anyone, let alone any group of people to accept partitioning and handing over to someone else something that belonged to them. It takes a generosity of spirit and altruistic selflessness that is more fiction than fact in human nature.
Now the coalition of Fatah/Hamas forming a newly realigned PA hopes that the Quartet and the UN and other countries of the Western world, formerly their benefactors in perpetuity will lift the economic and diplomatic blockade imposed upon it with the ascension of Islamist Hamas. For the simple reason that the world at large feels it is exceedingly impolite and impolitic for any responsible representative body of any country to maintain the fantasy that it is their ongoing obligation to rid the world of the presence of a perfectly legitimate country, just coincidentally their neighbour.
But since the PA's Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas continues to defy world demands that it recognize the legitimacy of the existence of its neighbour, Israel, there is some understandable reluctance on the part of the economic benefactors of the Palestinians from the West to continue funding their existence with the threat of demolishing their neighbour always in the background; how long before it moves forward on the agenda to become the foreground?
Moreover, since Hamas steadfastly insists that the Palestinians have the inalienable right to 'resist' their occupiers which happens to be the State of Israel which is constantly on the alert to pre-empt and prevent mayhem and murder on its streets by 'resisting' Palestinians this circuitous argument of righteous defiance gets nobody anywhere but back at square one time and time again.
Comes a time when reason must overtake righteous passion, when emotions give way to intelligence, when people see the utility of ploughshares fashioned from swords.
Labels: Middle East
posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 19, 2007
<< Home