In the Trenches: Hamas: words and deeds

There's the story of the mother determined that her five-year-old wunderkind should be well-educated and one day headed for a top university. She decided to pump him with new vocabulary words each day. When little Charlie came home from school, his mother promptly said, "Charlie, what's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" To which he, totally uninterested in the exercise, shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "I don't know and I don't care."

At times, that's the sense I get from the world about Hamas.

It's as if there is an ignorance, perhaps a willful ignorance, about what Hamas, which rules Gaza, really means.

Hamas was created in 1988. Its ideological foundation lies in the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Covenant says as much. Its goal is the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic state. It has been labeled a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States.

There are some in the West who choose to believe otherwise. Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations typifies this perspective. Writing in the Financial Times on September 14, 2006, he argued that Hamas would accept Israel in its 1967 borders, citing the alleged claim of one Hamas spokesman. Siegman returned to the argument in an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune earlier this month.

Going even further, the Financial Times, in a March 6th editorial, offered the following proposal, which gives new meaning to the definition of a nonstarter: "Hamas would have to accept a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with Arab east Jerusalem as its capital. But only as a result of creating such a state should it have to recognise Israel."

In presenting these positions, Siegman and the FT conveniently choose to ignore the mountains of contrary evidence pointing to Hamas's unchanged agenda. Perhaps those facts are too inconvenient to take into account.

Let's start with the Hamas Charter, or Covenant, which contains such juicy tidbits as:

"Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. 'Let the eyes of the cowards not fall asleep.'"

Or, "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors."

Or, "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews [and kill them]; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!'"

Or, "Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."

And for good measure, the Covenant also draws upon the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion with such language as:

"They [the Jews] stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests."

Some will argue that the Hamas Charter is now twenty years old. But has it been amended? Have the references to Jews, Zionism, Israel, violence and world conspiracies been excised? Not at all.

I've learned never to say never. Perhaps one day in the distant future, Hamas could finally change its stripes.

But today, the terrorist organization remains true to its mission of violently destroying Israel. The barrage of recent statements by Hamas leaders leaves no room for doubt, notwithstanding Siegman's effort to cling to one alleged and inconclusive comment. Then again, it's been said that the hardest thing for some to see is what's right in front of them.

Consider these words of Khaled Mashaal, the top Hamas leader, who is based in Damascus:

"Today, the Arab and Islamic nation is rising and awakening, and it will reach its peak Allah willing.... It will regain the leadership of the world. Allah willing, the day is not far off."

"Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a fact. Tomorrow, we will lead the world, Allah willing."

"We say to this West, which does not act reasonably, and does not learn its lessons: By Allah, you will be defeated."

Is Mashaal alone in his views? Hardly.

In November, on the sixtieth anniversary of the UN decision to recommend the partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, Hamas officially declared: "Palestine is Arab Islamic land from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem. There is no room in it for the Jews."

Mahmoud Zahar, another top Hamas official, asserted, "I dream of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel on it. I hope that our dream to have our independent state on all historic Palestine [will materialize]."

And just yesterday, Hamas "blessed" the horrific attack at Mercaz Harav in Jerusalem, where terrorists slaughtered students in a house of religious study.

On and on it goes. But what's more ominous is the matching of words to deeds. Witness the daily onslaught of rockets from Hamas-controlled Gaza to Israel.

At this point, to view Hamas as a group fighting for nothing more than Israel's return to its 1967 borders - or as a credible negotiating partner - stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.

And then there's the widespread indifference, as if the Israel-Hamas conflict was nothing more, perhaps, than a localized Hatfield-McCoy dispute. Wrong.

The conflict's implications are not only regional but global. Every nation that has a stake in democracy, pluralism and openness can ill afford to see Hamas achieve legitimacy, much less even a measure of success.

Recall that Hamas's worldview extends far beyond Israel and the Jews. It seeks global Islamic domination, the restoration of the Caliphate, rejection of Western values and repudiation of basic human rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Its kissing cousins are Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and Islamic Jihad.

Ask journalists about Hamas' commitment to freedom of expression, after it shut down the Gaza branch of the Union of Palestinian Journalists and now refuses to allow foreign reporters and photographers to operate without strict permission. Ask the tiny Christian community in Gaza what life is like under Hamas domination. Or women who aspire to freedom and equality. Or, for that matter, Fatah supporters in Gaza, such as Muhammad Swairki, a cook for Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard who, according to the Deutsche Press-Agentur, was shot in the knees and then thrown off the roof of a fifteen-story building.

Ignorance and indifference may be tempting escape valves, but they don’t solve the problem. To the contrary, they only exacerbate it by creating illusory thinking.

Israel today faces a unique situation. It is bordered by a rump state that is led by a group openly calling for its destruction, trying in every way possible to smuggle in weapons and funds from patrons like Iran, and cavalierly using civilians as human shields.

Hamas is seeking to put Israel in an untenable position. If Israel doesn't enter Gaza, Israeli civilian lives are placed at risk by repeated rocket and mortar attacks. If Israel does enter Gaza, the usual suspects in the international community, including the UN Human Rights Council and some editorial writers, will undoubtedly pile on by condemning Israeli actions. And that doesn’t even account for Israel's grave challenges in conducting effective urban warfare, minimizing civilian casualties, and devising an exit strategy from a territory that it does not want to control.

There may be no easy answer for Israel, but ignoring or glossing over the true nature of Hamas - or seeking to reinvent it from a distance as a misunderstood, responsible negotiating partner - isn't the way to go.