History has a way of repeating itself, I wrote yesterday in Let’s Welcome Hamas—and so do our illusions about history.
One such illusion, I wrote, can be found in the “voices explaining that if Hamas is to satisfy the aspirations of the long-suffering residents of Gaza, it will inevitably be compelled to abandon its terroristic tactics and to embrace a more pragmatic and realistic approach to Israel and to the world around it.”
I wish, in writing those words, that I had not missed Martin Indyk’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post. Indyk spun out a scenario in which the Hamas takeover will redound to the good of Israel and the Middle East. As chaos and immiseration descend on Gaza, Palestinians living there, predicted Indyk, will “compare their fate under Hamas’s rule with the fate of their West Bank cousins under [Mahmoud] Abbas.” As the denizens of the strip then come to recognize that they are significantly worse off, they “might then force Hamas to come to terms with Israel, making it eventually possible to reunite Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity living in peace with the Jewish state.”
Of course, it is not as simple as all that. Indeed, concedes Indyk, “[i]t’s hard to believe that such a benign outcome could emerge from the growing Palestinian civil war.” But steering things in this direction is the best option for the Palestinian Authority, for Israel, and for the United States.
Some will even argue, writes Indyk, that it is time for Condoleezza Rice, after having invested so much effort in reaching a settlement of the conflict, to talk to Hamas. But this, he says, would be premature: Hamas’s “commitment to the destruction of Israel make it an unlikely partner, at least until governing Gaza forces it to act more responsibly.”
But do the imperatives of governing always “force” radicals to “to act more responsibly”? What are the lessons of the past? Martin Indyk knows a great deal about the Middle East, having served as ambassador to Israel under President Clinton. But does he also understand a great deal? Or, having been intimately involved in a “peace process” that led not to peace but to terrible cycles of bloodshed, is he a prisoner of illusions that compel him to move inexorably in an inalterable direction, beholding the outbreak of peace in any and every piece of news, no matter how unpromising and grim?
