Western Confusions Concerning Palestine

Cliff May argues that if President Obama reads Mosab Hassan Yousef's Son of Hamas, he might understand why his Middle East policies are all wrong.

The problem for Hamas, writes Mosab Hassan Yousef, has never been “Israel’s policies.” The problem for Hamas is “Israel’s very existence.” Hamas, Yousef adds, is “animated by religious fervor and the theology of jihad,” and it is “dedicated to the extinction of Israel.”

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Then came Camp David: In 2000, Pres. Bill Clinton put pressure on Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, who offered Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah, “about 90 percent of the West Bank, the entire Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state.” Additionally, Mosab writes, “a new international fund would be established to compensate Palestinians for property that had been taken from them. This ‘land for peace’ offer represented a historic opportunity for the long-suffering Palestinian people, something few Palestinians would have dared imagine possible. But even so, it was not enough for Arafat,” who rejected the offer, refused to negotiate further, and launched a bloody intifada against Israel.

Why? Yousef explains: “Yasser Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society. . . . For Arafat, there always seemed to be more to gain if Palestinians were bleeding. Another intifada would surely get the blood flowing and the Western news cameras rolling once again.”

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He wrote Son of Hamas because, he writes, “When Middle Eastern nations — Jews and Arabs alike — start to understand some of what I understand, only then will there be peace.”

And it would help if President Obama were to read his book and realize that Israel’s policies — least of all its plans to build housing for growing families in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem — are the least of the obstacles standing in the way of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

The problem is that Obama would probably just dismiss Yousef as a traitor.
Israel Matzav