Israel and Hamas

It is interesting that when the focus or spotlight is on you in a bad way the easiest way to shift the spotlight is to demonize someone or something else. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, has been doing it tough of late with corruption scandals swirling all around him and with allegations surfacing of his direct involvement. Hence, the warning issued by Olmert that this cease fire or truce that is scheduled to come into force on Thursday is Hamas' last chance. It seems that if Hamas does not play ball and behave then Israel is prepared to strike deep into the heart of the Gaza Strip.

In the Israeli PM's own words, the people of Gaza are "pissed off with Hamas".

Now I am not pro-Hamas. In fact I have no problem with it being labeled an extreme and fundamentalist organization. The problem as I see it is that Hamas is now a democratically elected entity. The "West", and primarily the US, severely misunderstood the social and political dynamics when there was agreement to the idea of Hamas participating in Palestinian elections.

There seems little doubt that Hamas is anti-Israel and this means, in my mind at least, that any kind of truce will be short-lived. I just do not believe that Hamas has the sort of governance control it needs to reign in the militants and stop the rocket attacks. I hope I am wrong. I would love to see genuine peace in that part of the world in my life time. Yep, the eternal optimist!

The Israeli PM has close links to Australia and has family members living in Australia. In fact his cousin is married to the Federal Parliamentary Secretary for Defence and an aunt in Sydney.

The PM has grand plans of making peace with Lebanon and Syria. The plan even includes opening an Israeli Embassy in Damascus. Now this kind of peace would significantly change the geo-political dynamic of the region for the better. However, before any of these grand plans are likely to come to fruition the PM needs to survive the corruption allegations that by all accounts have two possible outcomes; resignation or new elections.

In any event there seems to be an open invitation to the Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, to visit Israel. This comes on the heals of the Australian Federal Parliament passing a resolution that commemorated Israel's first 60 years of existence in March of 2008.

Maybe I will write more on this Middle East stuff in the future because I am an opinionated bugger on this issue!

Jimmy Carter and Hamas

The former US President is intending to meet up with Hamas leaders as well as leaders from Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. He will also be meeting up with representatives of Fatah which is Hamas' main rival in the Palestinian territory.

Hamas is listed on a US list of terrorist organizations. So, in some ways it is an interesting turn of events that a former President of the US is going to pay a courtesy call to a group that the country he formerly led characterizes as a bunch of terrorists. Nevertheless, perhaps his point is valid; that if there is to be true peace with justice in the region then the views of Hamas need to be known and worked into the equation with all the other divergent views raging within the Palestinian debate, including those of Israel.

Despite Ahmadinejad's warnings of wiping Israel of the face of the map the likelihood of that happening is about as likely as Israel wiping Iran of the face of the map! They might go to war and kill most of each others citizens but the land will not disappear and neither will the idea that Israel exists. The arguments about nation building, success or failure, as it relates to Israel is not this argument and not for this blog entry.

However, the current US position is that Hamas is an impediment to peace and that nothing constructive can come from any meeting between Carter and Khalid Meshaal, the exiled leader of Hamas.

We need a world at peace to focus on those matters that we must address in order to sustain us!

On a side note the presumptive nominee from the Democratic Party in the US, Barack Obama, has come out and said that he would not meet with Hamas which is kind of strange considering he has previously said that his foreign policy would be based on active engagement of rogue leaders and States (at least as the US sees them) such as Raul Castro (Fidel before him) in Cuba and Ahmadinejad in Iran. So, why not Hamas? A different blog entry I suppose!