One of the few things the Islamic world clearly has over the United States is its sense of patience. While our democratic leaders scurry for “solutions” that fit inside of four- and eight-year timeframes, the leaders of Islamic groups know that they face no elections and need not demonstrate the short-term success of their strategies in order to remain in power. Which is what is happening right now with Hamas.
Peter Beinart provides a classic of the pro-engagement genre in which he recommends that the U.S. acquiesce to, and then engage with, a Hamas-Fatah unity government, in order to give Hamas an incentive for good behavior.
But the thing that’s been preventing a Fatah-Hamas unity government is not the absence of U.S. or Israeli recognition. It’s Hamas’ demand that such a government not participate in any permanent-status peace talks with Israel. How would it work in practice to incorporate a group into the PA that is an enemy of the very thing the PA was created to accomplish? The problem with Hamas isn’t engagement at all, as Beinart would like it to be. The problem is what happens after engagement, when Hamas has a “stake in governing.”
It was precisely Hamas’ “stake in governing” — its victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections — that set the group up to violently evict the PA from Gaza the next year. And once Hamas was completely in control of Gaza, it did not moderate in the slightest — it became even more aggressive toward Israel and indifferent to the welfare of Palestinians. Hamas’ track record refutes every bit of Beinart’s hypothesizing. And so does the track record of Hamas’ terrorist colleague, Hezbollah, whose incorporation into the Lebanese government was followed by a war with Israel in 2006 and the group’s violent revolt against its Lebanese political rivals in 2008. The idea that terror groups are “moderated” by their inclusion in governments has to be at or near the top of the list of western fantasies about Islamic supremacism.
But back to the question of patience. Beinart, articulating what is becoming establishment wisdom, writes that “our policy of shooting and stonewalling wasn’t succeeding in either eradicating terrorist movements and their patrons or moderating them.” What he means to say is that stonewalling hasn’t been successful in quickly moderating terrorist movements. The PLO was founded in 1964, and only earned U.S. recognition in 1993 when it decided, however inauthentically, to publicly rescind its call for the destruction of Israel. The U.S. stonewalled Yasser Arafat for 30 years; Beinart wants to relent on Hamas after two.
