Making It Fail

For some reason, President Bush has decided that this is the right period to be pushing for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace track. The latest foray into these waters is a proposed timeline of steps each side can take, with the goal of ending Qassam rocket fire at Israel and lifting some of the burden of Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already said parts are unacceptable to Israel, but he needn't worry because Hamas is planning to, "work to make it fail by any means and by all means."

The driving force behind Hamas's hard-line stance seems to be Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader based in Damascus who has been using Hamas's Parliamentary majority to exert a commanding influence over the policies which will affect those who actually live in the Palestinian territories. His excuse is that not firing rockets at Israel or important weapons to Gaza would constitute "giving up resistance." I freely grant that the Palestinians have the right to resist the Israeli occupation, but this fetishizes it to a ridiculous, though not entirely surprising, extent.