De Israelische Terreur 341

Inescapable Hamas
Le Monde Editorial

Three months after the international meeting the United States organized in Annapolis on November 27, 2007, can we still talk about an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? After seven years of subcontracting the Palestinian issue to the Israeli authorities, with the success we see before us, George Bush, supported by the Europeans, had imagined a last-minute re-engagement to save a regional policy shipwrecked in Iraq.
Taking advantage of the bloody rupture between Hamas's Islamists - sole masters of Gaza - and President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, Washington had conceived the following plan: favor the Fatah-controlled West Bank and make it the laboratory for the state-to-come, irrigated by donations gathered during the December 2007 Paris conference, so that Hamas, isolated in Gaza, should become the target of Palestinian anger and frustration and so that Palestinian public opinion would turn away from that organization.
For this plan to succeed, however, it would have been necessary for the Gaza Strip, under siege by the Israeli Army since its unilateral withdrawal in September 2005, to disappear into oblivion, preserved by UN transfusions. That was not the case, given Palestinian rocket fire that has spectacularly reversed the scale of deterrence during the last two years of a second Intifada that was too quickly deemed an indisputable Israeli military victory. Twice in the last several weeks, Israeli attempts to put a halt to that rocket fire - which primarily affects civilians, even if it is less deadly than the attacks of armed Palestinian groups during the 2001 to 2004 period - have turned to the Israelis' disadvantage.
First of all, the embargo Labor Defense Minister Ehud Barack wanted sparked the January dynamiting of a part of the border guarded by the Egyptian Army - which is very mistrustful of Hamas, a successor organization to the Muslim Brotherhood Hosni Mubarak's regime continues to incarcerate. The return of Israeli tanks to the alleys of the Jabaliya refugee camp March 1 and 2 was no more fruitful than previous attempts, decimating trapped Palestinian civilians without stopping the rocket fire. From this perspective, the outcome is proving catastrophic even, since the Israeli town of Ashkelon, ten kilometers north of Gaza, is now under fire from Palestinian weaponry more sophisticated than in the past and, according to Jerusalem, acquired thanks to Iran's support.
Consequently, the "West Bank First" plan has achieved precisely what it was supposed to avoid: installing Hamas at the center of the game and to such a degree that the pertinence of Israel, the United States, and the Europeans boycotting a radical organization that is also capable of pragmatism is more than ever open to question.'

Zie: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030508G.shtml Of in het Frans:
http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2008/03/04/incontournable-hamas_1018544_3218.html