Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

Hamas Keeps Mum as Syria Assaults Palestinian Refugee Camp

Published August 18, 2011

Syrian forces attacked a Palestinian refugee camp in Latakia this week, causing up to 10,000 residents to flee. UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, said it has no idea where they went, how many were killed, or whether wounded and elderly people might still be trapped in the camp; it deemed the situation “very, very worrying.” A senior Palestinian Authority official, Yasser Abed Rabbo, went even further, terming the attack “a crime against humanity.” But one Palestinian organization had not a word to say about this assault on its brethren: Hamas.

Hamas, of course, is deeply beholden to Bashar Assad’s regime: It’s headquartered in Damascus and receives extensive military and financial aid from Assad’s patron, Iran. For the same reason, smaller Palestinian terror organizations based in Syria also kept quiet about the assault. But unlike these smaller groups, Hamas aspires to lead the Palestinians; it even won the last Palestinian election. That’s precisely why many Westerners advocate engaging with this terrorist organization: They say it authentically represents many Palestinians, and therefore can’t be ignored.

But if this “authentic Palestinian representative” can’t even be bothered to condemn a brutal assault on its own people, exactly Palestinian aspirations does it represent? Surely not the aspiration for a better life: If that were Hamas’s goal, it would condemn the assault, since being forced to flee their homes presumably makes the refugees’ lives worse.

Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar effectively answered that question last month in an interview with DPA:

“We are not going to recognize Israel. That is very simple. And we are not going to accept Israel as the owner of one square centimeter because it is a fabricated state” … He says accepting Israel’s right to exist would “cost 10 million Palestinians their right to Palestine. Who can pay that price?”

In short, Hamas is an authentic representative of that 66% of Palestinians who still see Israel’s destruction as their ultimate goal, the 80% who agree with Hamas’s charter that “battalions from the Arab and Islamic world” should come defeat the Jews, the 73% who agree with its charter “about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.” Or more accurately, it represents those Palestinians who consider its tactics the best way to achieve these goals: As the above poll showed, most Palestinians see a two-state solution as an effective stepping-stone to the goal of eradicating Israel; that’s why most prefer the PA’s declared support for it to Hamas’s open opposition. After all, the PA also sees a two-state solution as a tool for eradicating Israel; see, for instance, its insistent demand for a “right of return” or its denial of Jewish history in Jerusalem.

But in recent years, the PA government in the West Bank has also done something to improve its people’s daily lives. Hamas-controlled Gaza, in contrast, remains a hellhole — because, as its silence over the Syrian assault makes clear, improving Palestinian lives isn’t even on its agenda; it exists solely to destroy Israel.

Which begs one question: Is that really what advocates of engaging Hamas want to support?

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/18/hamas-syria-refugees/
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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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