Clueless in Gaza
By Charles Krauthammer
WashingtonPost.com
John Kerry is upset by heavy criticism from Israelis
—
left, right and center — of his recent
cease-fire diplomacy. But that’s only half the
story. More significant is the consternation of
America’s Arab partners, starting with the president
of the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas was
stunned that Kerry would fly off to Paris to
negotiate with Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey in
talks that excluded the PA and Egypt.
The talks also undermined Egypt’s cease-fire
proposal, which
Israel had accepted and Hamas rejected (and
would have prevented the
vast majority of the casualties on both sides).
“Kerry tried through his latest plan to destroy the
Egyptian bid,” charged
a senior Palestinian official quoted in the Arab
daily Asharq Al-Awsat — a peace plan that the PA
itself had supported.
It gets worse. Kerry did not just trample an
Egyptian initiative. It was backed by the entire
Arab League and specifically praised by Saudi
Arabia. With the exception of Qatar — more a bank
than a country — the Arabs are unanimous in wanting
to see Hamas weakened, if not overthrown. The
cease-fire-in-place they backed would have denied
Hamas any reward for starting this war, while what
Kerry brought back from Paris granted practically
all of its demands.
Which is what provoked the severe criticism Kerry
received at home. When as respected and scrupulously
independent a national security expert as
David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a
blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from
the usual suspects. This is general amazement at
Kerry’s cluelessness.
Kerry seems oblivious to the strategic reality that
Hamas launched its rockets in the hope not of
defeating Israel but of ending its
intra-Arab isolation (which it brilliantly
achieves in the Qatar-Turkey peace proposal).
Hamas’s radicalism has alienated nearly all of its
Arab neighbors.
●Egypt cut it off —
indeed blockaded Gaza — because of Hamas’s
support for the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist
attacks on Egyptian soldiers in Sinai.
●Fatah, the main element of the Palestinian
Authority, is a bitter enemy, particularly since its
Gaza members were terrorized, kneecapped, expelled
and/or killed when Hamas seized Gaza in a 2007 coup.
●Hamas is non grata in Syria, where it had been
previously headquartered, for supporting the
anti-government rebels.
●Hamas
is deeply opposed by Jordan, Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf states, which see it, correctly, as yet
another branch of the Islamist movement that
threatens relatively moderate pro-Western Arab
states.
Kerry seems not to understand that the
Arab League backed the Egyptian
cease-fire-in-place, which would have left Hamas
weak and isolated, to ensure that Hamas didn’t
emerge from this war strengthened and enhanced.
Why didn’t Kerry just stay home and declare
unequivocal U.S. support for the Egyptian/Arab
League plan? Instead, he flew off to Paris and sent
Jerusalem a package of victories for Hamas: lifting
the blockade from Egypt, opening the border with
Israel, showering millions of foreign cash to pay
the salaries of the 43,000 (!) government workers
that the near-insolvent Hamas cannot.
Forget about Israeli interests. Forget about Arab
interests. The American interest is to endorse and
solidify this emerging axis of moderate pro-American
partners (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, and the
Palestinian Authority) intent on seeing Islamist
radicalism blunted and ultimately defanged.
Yet America’s secretary of state doesn’t see it.
Speaking of Hamas-run Gaza,
Kerry actually said in Paris: “The Palestinians
can’t have a cease-fire in which they think the
status quo is going to stay.” What must change?
Gazans need “goods that can come in and out . . . a
life that is free from the current restraints.”
But the only reason for those “restraints,” why
goods are unable to go in and out, is that for a
decade Hamas has used this commerce to import and
develop weapons for making war on Israel.
Remember the complaints that the heartless Israelis
were not allowing enough imports of concrete for
schools and hospitals? Well, now we know where the
concrete went — into an astonishingly
vast array of tunnels for infiltrating
neighboring Israeli villages and killing civilians.
(More than half a million tons, estimates the
Israeli military.)
Lifting the blockade would mean a flood of arms,
rockets, missile parts and other implements of
terror for Hamas. What is an American secretary of
state doing asserting that Hamas cannot cease fire
unless it gets that?
Moreover, the fire from which Hamas will not cease
consists of deliberate rocket attacks on Israeli
cities — by definition, a war crime.
Whatever his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas’s war
criminality. Which makes his advocacy of Hamas’s
terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a
U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a
wall-to-wall Arab front wants to see it gone — but a
moral disgrace.