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Do Not Arafatize Abbas

Nicholas M. Guariglia - 7/18/2007

What are we to make of Jimmy Carter’s most recent hysteria? Palestine has reached its two-state solution, albeit having nothing to do with Israel. One is a shoot-‘em-up gangland (West Bank), the other, recently seized by mask-clad Hamas killers, an urban jihadist slum (Gaza Strip). And yet Mr. Carter, with his twang, is castigating not Hamas or Fatah, which throw each other off roofs, but the United States for its “criminal” policy of not trying to reconcile the two terrorist factions together.

This ranting character once held the title of “President Carter,” so we are not dealing with a Noam Chomsky or pseudo-intellectual Marxist utopian, here. Of course the irony is twofold: firstly, the West actually encouraged Hamas to partake in a democratic experiment it vowed it would destroy, asking only that it retract its desire to annihilate Israel. And secondly, Carter seems to invoke a disproportionate amount of worry and empathy for the Fatah-Hamas hooligans than he did for the Shah of Iran and the Somozas (amongst others) who fell during his presidency.

Has it truly come to this for the now aloof old man –– that Carter is suggesting we actually subsidize terrorist groups as a key pillar of our counterterrorism strategy? Is this the doctrine which opponents of the Bush administration are apt to follow? Iraq “took our eye off the ball,” but must the alternative consist of sending expenditures and arms to our avowed enemies?

Carter’s deranged; he suffers from the amoral tyranny of good intentions where, in his quest to seek global solace and “understand” perceived grievances, his proverbial finger invariably leads right back to his homeland. Why else would the self-proclaimed human rights champion confide with a Romanian tyrant to make peace between Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship, or mingle with Castro, or oversee the “legitimate” elections in Venezuela (which the EU wouldn’t even touch), and on, and on? Carter has become a caricature of himself, a non-entity for quite some time, still defending his “magnificent” 1994 deal with Kim Jong Il over nuclear roguery. So enough about him.

Which brings American statecraft to the question of Palestine, where the old maxim rings true: Never kill a man that’s committing suicide. For all my life, the Palestinians have consistently missed the opportunity to have an opportunity. Their crocodile-tear plight is reminiscent of those adolescents who want independence from their parents, but live off their parental dependency all the same; a push-pull silliness. They want the allowance but not the curfew.

The Palestinian body politic is so warped and so poisoned with bad people, there is nothing our diplomatists can or should do soon to wean them off their resentment. The legitimate two-state solution has failed, this time not due to Arafat rejecting 97-percent of what he requested, but due to Palestinian inability to reconcile amongst each other (Hamas and Fatah could not agree over whether to kill the Jews now or later).

While the Fatah gunmen are, in theory, more preferable than the Islamists of Hamas, the Bush bunch are at fault for believing the Fatah killers are worthy of our overt support. This is almost as equally credulous an idea as Carter’s imbecility in recognizing and assisting both crackpot posses. So the ersatz choices are, we either abide by the doctrinal teachings of romanticists who seek a reunion between the theocrats, or we follow the Kissingerian acumen which seeks Palestinian dictatorship as the price for Palestinian antiterrorism. Both are doomed to fail.

But there is an evolving strategy which is becoming clearer by the day: hands off. An observer with strategic insight and a bit of patience ought to tolerate the temporary success of the Hamas crew. We know them all too well; their political success is the immediate beginning of their end. Supporters of democratizing the Mideast must come to understand and tolerate the near-term achievement of undemocratic Islamists as the necessary precursor to their discrediting and the ascendancy and empowerment of genuine democrats.

Hamas is nothing more than an Iranian-backed despotic clan keen on zealotry and Jew liquidation. Like fascistic currents prior, they rose to power through parasitic and democratic means they inherently opposed, and then challenged the pretenses of those very means and institutions once in power. They are intrinsically opposed to peace, deny the Israeli right to breath, are part and parcel of the broader transnational terror movement, have been and are a satrapy of the mullahs in Tehran, and are cold-blooded murderers which indoctrinate the minds of their youngest and most impressionable. And thankfully, due to their preconditioned obsession on violence, they’re rather unintelligent in the most literal sense of the term.

As out of power slaughterers, they blame their societal miseries on the corruption of the Fatah autocracy, the incompetence of the PLO, and the evils of the Jewish entity. Yet in power, they will be just as incapable of sweeping the streets as they will be in expediting vaccines, or guaranteeing prenatal care, of generating a middle class, or running a ministry, or spawning economic growth.

The precepts of political Islam mandates prerequisite fixation with the most infinitesimal of idiotic details: the covering of female skin, the godly and divinely-inspired aversion to ham, for example, or an absolute ban on watching soccer matches on television. Their own mania on maintaining a moral stasis, their own religiosity and fundamentalist stupidity, will do them over in short order. But the internal rotting process must be allowed to proceed uninterrupted for a tad, without outside beefing up, or international assistance to back the Hamas theocracy. They’re the big boys now. Let them run themselves into the ground.

In the interim, U.S. statesmen can approach genuine Palestinian democrats like the current premier Dr. Salam Fayyad, or Mustafa Barghouti, to form a third party, a new polity, based upon the principalities of democracy and statehood; a party which would reject the theocracy of Hamas and the autocracy of Fatah. This political reorganization –– which is bound to steal away Fatah’s unwilling members, its brightest and most peaceful, like Fayyad –– along with a cessation of assistance for President Abbas himself, will create conditions where Palestinians will weigh the options between the lunacy in Gaza and the alternative offered by this third polity.

A “good” Palestinian need not be subservient to the United States or in love with Israel; these descriptions fit neither Salam Fayyad nor Mustafa Barghouti. Somewhere across the Palestinian landscape rests their Gandhi, their Mandela, and that voice will never be heard for as long as we seek to “Arafatize” and legitimize Abbas. Fatah is not the antidote to Hamas; it is the excuse for it. If we stop supporting the former and begin allowing the latter to wallow in its own idiocy, while organizing a justifiable democratic Palestinian resistance, we may be able to pull something off. Let’s try it.