False Peace

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Hamas leader Khaled Meshal tells the West­ern media some inter­est­ing and para­dox­i­cal things:

The leader of the mil­i­tant Pales­tin­ian group Hamas said Mon­day that its fight­ers had stopped fir­ing rock­ets at Israel for now. He also reached out in a lim­ited way to the Obama admin­is­tra­tion and oth­ers in the West, say­ing the move­ment was seek­ing a state only in the areas Israel won in 1967…

He repeated that he would not rec­og­nize Israel, say­ing to fel­low Arab lead­ers, “There is only one enemy in the region, and that is Israel.”

On the two-state solu­tion sought by the Amer­i­cans, he said: “We are with a state on the 1967 bor­ders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dis­man­tling of set­tle­ments and the right of return of the Pales­tin­ian refugees.” Asked what “long-term” meant, he said 10 years.

Here is what Meshal is really say­ing once one under­stands the sub­tleties of his message:

We sup­port a Pales­tin­ian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip  [the so-called pre-1967 bor­ders] that will be at rel­a­tive peace with Israel for ten years.

Hamas does not want peace with Israel. The ter­ror­ist group is adver­tis­ing that it is employ­ing a tac­tic that astute observers of the Mid­dle East have observed for years. An extrem­ist group ter­ror­izes Israel while the Jew­ish state tol­er­ates the attacks as long as pos­si­ble. When Israel finally responds with the inten­tion of end­ing the blood­shed, the world cries foul and gets the two sides to agree to a cease-fire. After the ter­ror­ists regroup and resup­ply their weapons, they begin attack­ing again. And the cycle starts anew. In this inter­view, Meshal is say­ing that Hamas will wait ten years to attack Israel again — pre­sum­ably under the assump­tion that the Pales­tini­ans will have even more sup­port and weapons capa­bil­i­ties from a much-stronger Iran at that time.

Meshal seems to say that Hamas is becom­ing more mod­er­ate — that it sees a two-state solu­tion. But, in real­ity, noth­ing has changed.

Peo­ple in the West, par­tic­u­larly those on the far left, firmly believe that any con­flict can end as long as medi­a­tion and nego­ti­a­tions are ongo­ing. This is the sin­cere, ide­al­is­tic hope of lib­eral democ­racy in a world based on secure nation-states. But the Mid­dle East is a dif­fer­ent world that oper­ates under a dif­fer­ent set of rules.

The West believes that the best way to end con­flict is through com­pro­mise and nego­ti­a­tion. But that view is based on the assump­tion that both par­ties are ratio­nal actors. Hamas is not ratio­nal (and, most likely, nei­ther is Iran). There are two real­is­tic ways to end wars: 1.) Medi­a­tion and nego­ti­a­tion; and 2.) Win thor­oughly. When the enemy is resound­ingly defeated, if not erad­i­cated, the war is indeed over. But this is a real­ity of the Mid­dle East that the West has never been com­fort­able accept­ing because they hold to a dif­fer­ent set of rules that always prefers the first option.

Unless Meshal and his ter­ror­ist ilk have a reli­gious epiphany and dis­avow extrem­ist Islam, Hamas will never try to make peace. So, the only other option is to erad­i­cate Hamas while help­ing to build a mod­er­ate, Pales­tin­ian state with a viable, mod­er­ate, func­tion­ing society.