The Necessary Destruction of Hamas by William Pfaff

The Necessary Destruction of Hamas

William Pfaff


Paris, December 30, 2008 – Whether reasonable or not, it was probably inevitable that the men and women who created Israel would turn it into a modern equivalent of Sparta. They were forced to fight for that part of partitioned Palestine (a British Mandate) that the United Nations organization in 1948 designated as the Jewish Homeland, and which British prime minister Arthur Balfour had promised to the Zionist movement.

During the first world war this promise undoubtedly seemed unimportant. Most European and American Jews had no interest in Palestine. After the Holocaust, the promise had to be fulfilled, whatever it meant for the Palestinians, who were not consulted.

Jewish forces, organized and trained in the Palestinian underground, or veterans of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army or of other western armies, seized even more territory than was due to Israel in the UN agreement, thanks to the divided command and tactical ineptitude of the Arab armies trying to stop them. That was the first Israeli victory in the wars it would fight to preserve, and then in 1967, to expand Israel.

These repeated wars were responsible for the initial, and potentially fatal, political and military strategy adopted by the new Jewish state. This was that Israel must acquire permanent military domination of the Middle East, against any enemy or any combination of enemies. It was a comprehensible decision, but the commitment to military domination, rather than negotiations to search for a peaceful settlement among the Arabs, automatically was a choice of society and political culture. (It was also a military choice that had a very important influence on Pentagon strategic thinking.)

The Israeli choice was between the two most important political currents that existed in Zionism. It was to prove a fateful choice, and conceivably an ultimately fatal one.

The abandoned choice was the one originally made by the founders of Israel, that of secular social democracy. This political and social model was embodied in the Labor Party, with the model of Israel as an altruistic socialist state. It and the idealistic Kibbutz movement deeply marked the character of early Israel.

The other tradition, which slowly but steadily replaced it after the 1967 war with the Arabs, had also (like the Labor Party} originated in Europe at a time when Zionism was just another Central European romantic nationalist movement among many others. Jewish nationalism – Zionism -- was inspired by the impending break-up of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, and by the Dreyfus Case in France, which revealed the extent of European anti-Semitism.

These European nationalist groups were convinced that if they could only possess their own sovereign territory under their own leaders (naturally, the writers and speechmakers who originated these movements expected to be those leaders – and in the end most were), the result would be a better and happier world. Woodrow Wilson shared their enthusiasm (although as a strict WASP Calvinist clergyman, he was a little uncertain about the Zionists).

This second theory was called Revisionism, and was created by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Jew, born in Odessa. It took a strictly realistic and ruthless view of the problems of creating a new state in an alien territory, among people who automatically would be hostile to the intruders.


He did not have a high opinion of European Jews, nor of Jewish assimilation in Europe. He was not religious. He wanted Jewish spiritual regeneration through the struggle for Zionism and the rescue of the Jews from Europe. He was, in effect, an imperialist, and a believer in power.

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in his book, The Controversy of Zion, the Zionist vision, according to Jabotinsky, "could only be realized by a Jewish minority...and this required the use of force." He held that "all that is great owes its triumph to the sword." He was a right-wing nationalist; the Likud party in Israel has always represented his views.

Former president Benjamin Netenyahu and Foreign Minister Tzipi Levni are both from families who were supporters of Jabotinsky. She is a former Mossad operator. Defense Minister Ehud Barak is assumed to share their views.

With Labor in power in Israel in the past, it was always possible to think that a two-state solution was possible between Israelis and Palestinians. This cannot be said about the Jabotinsky right. They do not believe that a settlement with the Arabs is feasible. They believe, as Barak has said, that the bombardment of Gaza must continue until Hamas is destroyed. Hamas is an unacceptable element in the region, as they envisage it. Israel was humiliated by Hizbollah in Lebanon two years ago. It must reestablish its position of total military domination of the Middle East. Destroying Hamas is the way to do it.

The present Israeli government seems now to think that it can do this in Gaza, before the new administration in the United States of Barack Obama takes power. It is a show of force intended as a demonstration to the United States, as well as to Hamas.

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This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com

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