Jimmy Carter, peacemaker extraordinaire (at least in his own mind), has returned from meeting with Hamas’s leadership in Syria with news that Hamas is ready to make peace. This terrorist organization, according to Carter,
said that they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, if approved by Palestinians and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace.
If that is in fact Hamas’s view, they have a funny way of showing it. For instance, on Saturday, Hamas terrorists drove jeeps and armored personnel carriers loaded with explosives into one of the crossing points with Israel that is used to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
Terrorists in Hamas-controlled Gaza also continue to fire hundreds of rockets into southern Israel. Meanwhile, as summed up in this New York Times report, a new Israeli study has found that Hamas “is engaged in the broadest and most significant military buildup in its history with help from Syria and Iran,” stockpiling “more and more powerful weapons, especially longer-range rockets against Israel‘s southern communities.”
Yet if Carter is to believed, Hamas is happy to set itself on an entirely different course–if only Israel and the United States would engage in direct negotiations with it. This is the kind of thing that, well, only Jimmy Carter could possibly believe.
While it may be possible that Hamas is willing to engage in a hudna–a temporary truce–it would be only for the purposes of strengthening itself in preparation for what it imagines to be that glorious day when Israel would be wiped off the map. As its charter puts it: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
The charter goes on to say:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgment Day.
One might add that if no “Palestinian or Arab . . . king or president” can induce Hamas to give up its claim to “the land of Palestine” it is doubtful that an infidel former leader of the Great Satan can do so.
