2006-02-20-political

By Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM--It is more than a little risky offering prophecy from Jerusalem. This is the city that knew the likes of Jeremiah and Isaiah, and where death was the penalty for "false prophecy."

Let it be said in my defense that I do not aspire to as many readers as Jeremiah and Isaiah; and against those who would accuse me of false prophecy, I make no pretense to prophesizing in the biblical sense of having heard the word of the Lord.

All that being said, it seems to me that we are on the verge of the end of the Oslo process. That goes back to 1993, when Israel and the PLO signed a series of accords after delegates met in Oslo. It was meant to pave the way for a Palestinian state that would live in peace alongside Israel. It began by Israel turning over control of Jericho to the Palestinians, as a first step.

At the time, I was spending a sabbatical at the University of Utah. I appeared on a local television station alongside a Palestinian colleague. I recall saying that Yassir Arafat's future lay in his hands. If he proved reasonable, he could end his career as the President of Palestine. If not, he might end up as mayor of Jericho.

I was too optimistic. Arafat turned down an offer made by Prime Minister Ehud Barak alongside President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000, and encouraged or tolerated violence in order to get a better deal. He lost big, and ended his life confined to his headquarters building in Ramallah. He could not go beyond the front steps without encountering Israeli troops and tanks who caused him to go back inside.

At his death, Mahmoud Abbas took over. He sounded better than Arafat, in being more sincere in advocating peace and criticizing terror. Yet he would not, or could not, do even the minimum to stop the mayhem. He did not, for example, use the 30,000 security personnel he ostensibly controlled in Gaza against the few hundred extremists who fire their homemade rockets toward Israel.

Now Hamas has won a parliamentary election. It is impossible to know if it won because a majority of Palestinians want an Islamic state and accept the lines of Hamas that Israel must be destroyed, or if they were voting against the aged and corrupt clique under Abbas who used so much of the money donated to Palestine as their private wealth.

Whatever the background, Hamas presents an image of being truly on another planet. Its party covenant, created in 1988, blames the Zionists for the French and Russian revolutions, World Wars I and II, and for controlling the world through its banks, media, Freemasons, Rotary, and Lions. It expresses a few conciliatory words about Jews and Christians, on condition that we accept the superiority of Muslim rule.

The absolute craziness of the document goes beyond the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Hamas' covenant was composed a century of so more recently than the Protocols, and should have reflected something other than intellectual regression.

Unfortunately, the party covenant is not an isolated fragment of Palestinian thought. I recall a conversation with an Israeli Arab student during the height of Intafada al-Aqsa. He told me that a number of his friends thought that Israel was blowing up its own buses in order to give it an excuse to attack Palestinians. I thought at the time that he was saying indirectly that he thought that as well as his "friends." My response was that the attitude reflected how far apart the Arab and Jewish cultures were, and the problems of communicating across such a divide.

Likewise with Hamas. In the most recent days I have heard a number of its spokesmen slip away from questions about the movement's covenant. Apparently, it is something the organization cannot or does not want to disavow.

Acting prime minister Olmert has already said that a government with a significant representation of Hamas will be irrelevant for Israel, and that the next Israeli government and Knesset must concern themselves with defining the country's borders. This means a continuation of unilateral moves began with disengagement from Gaza. Palestinians will have some land that is left over, but a lot less than if they could bring themselves to bargain by giving up some demands and insisting on others. Building barriers and defining boundaries unilaterally will cause Israel some problems with European governments, the Russians, the United Nations and maybe even an American administration. But Hamas intransigence will help Israel resist unwanted pressure. It already is looking good, insofar as Hamas is turning to Iran as its prime benefactor and mentor. With enemies like that, we do not need too many friends.

Sharkansky is an emeritus member of the political science department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem