Bush is closing his ears to all sensible advice on the Palestinian issue. He and his faithful deputy Condoleezza Rice want to make the forthcoming Israel-Palestinian peace conference in the US next month a success and at the same time they are shutting out Hamas totally from the picture.
Hamas is popular amongst the Palestinians and it has won elections fairly held in Palestine. It has shown its capacity to govern responsibly. Hamas leaders have proved themselves mature after they engineered the release of a British journalist some months back. They are dedicated and honest as compared to the corrupt Fatah. This is the reason Israel fears them and wants to keep them away from control of Palestine - a thought that US is happy to oblige on.
Former US president Jimmy Carter was the first to criticize Bush’s minus-Hamas, plus-Fatah Palestinian policy.
Now John Dugard, a UN human rights envoy for the Palestinian Territories, has joined the chorus. He bluntly propagates that UN should withdraw from the Middle East Quartet as it is just acting as a willing lapdog of the US. Israel has broken all human rights by oppressing the Palestinians. He says he is pessimistic of a positive outcome of the peace conference due next month as Hamas has been totally ignored.
Dugard is right. Palestinians in Gaza are facing untold hardships.
Gaza has been designated a “hostile entity” by Israel.
An embargo has brought the economy of the Gaza Strip to a state of collapse.
Most residents in Gaza are jobless.
About 1.4 million people live in the Gaza Strip. Most of them, 1.1 million, survive on UN food rations.
Israel has plans of invading the territory to stop the stream of Qassam rockets from there into Israel as this would earn the beleaguered Olmert some more votes.
Carter and Dugard are not the only ones to point at the dangers of excluding Hamas. In a recent letter to Condoleezza Rice, a group of former American diplomats called for the inclusion of Hamas in the November summit. Their plan offers full peace in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from land captured in 1967, plus a “‘just solution” for Palestinian refugees.
Another group of senior Americans - retired lawmakers and officials, including two former national security advisors, Zbiegniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft - has also intervened with a letter to Bush. They call for a dialogue with Hamas - and also with Syria. They say that Hamas includes realistic people, who do not want a permanent state of war and conflict.
One hopes for the peace in the Middle East that Bush listens to these voices of sanity. When the Camp David summit in 2000, during Clinton’s presidency, collapsed it sucked hope out of the region. A couple of months later followed the second Palestinian intifada.
There is a real danger of a third intifada if Bush rashly goes ahead with the peace conference sans Hamas. Hamas has the capacity to destroy everything that Olmert, Abbas and Bush cook up.
