Mark wrote in response to my earlier message: > Thanks for your (extended) comments in answer to my question. > What led to it was my thinking, "The Hamas Charter is a bargaining > chip? Hmmm, that must mean that (like John G.'s example of > offering prices when haggling) the charter is an overstatement of > the goals of the Hamasians, that they are willing to settle for much less. > How does that work? Has this ever happened before in history? > I can't think of a single example, but what do I know? Maybe the > well-read John M. knows of a precedent." > I was mulling over this question for a few days, without going back > and rereading your remarks to see that you never actually said that the > Hamas Charter is insincere. My error, sorry. > So let's take it -- as the philosophical principle of charity demands -- > that the Hamasians are not saying things just for effect, but mean every > word in their Charter (in which, incidentally, I find a new favorite > article every time I read it, like article 25, which assures one and all that > "Hamas ... only wishes well to individuals and groups." Feel the love!). > So yes, the task before us is the recovery of Zionia Irredenta, and > then on to Andalusia Irredenta and, inshallah, the global caliphate.
Mark, I assume you have heard of the island known as Taiwan. Well, 25 years ago I spent a year there learning Chinese at the Stanford Center (now relocated to Beijing). At that time, Taiwan was still a one-party dictatorship run by the Kuomintang (KMT), the party of Chiang Kai-shek and the other mainlanders who had fled China in defeat in the late 1940s and set up a rump regime on the island in the vain hope that one day Chinese communism would eventually collapse and they would be able to return to power in the PRC. Now, these KMT folks had some odd ideas. For one thing, they had the most curious maps. The maps indicated that Taiwan was a province of the Republic of China, which was the government set up in China in 1911 (though not really in charge of China until 1927) and to which China was returned from Japan in 1945. The maps further called the country the rest of the world knew as the People's Republic of China "the Republic of China". And on top of that, the maps included "Outer Mongolia", that is, the country that the rest of the world called the "Mongolian People's Republic", which was established in 1924) as part of China! The maps further omitted any of the many changes that had occurred after 1949, for example, such minor things as railways, bridges over the Yangtze River, and so on. And there were other strange things on Taiwan. For instance, I bought a pirate copy of a Sanseido Japanese > English dictionary, which was OK except for the entries for "Mo Takuto" and "Shu Enrai" and "Chuka Jinmin Kyowakoku", where everything had been excised and only blank white spaces remained. And then when I read the Taiwanese press, the character for "bandit" (fei3) or the phrase gong4fei3 (= communist bandits), was regularly used to label any official of the PRC government, as though the inhabitants of Zhongnanhai were still holed up in the caves at Yan'an. And there was a big banner over the Tai-p'ei railway station, which read "Guang1fu4 Da4lu4! (Gloriously Recover the Mainland!). Well, guess what? A few years after I left Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek who was the president of the ROC/Taiwan following his father's death, passed away. And his death was the moment when the KMT folks on Taiwan (at that point mostly younger people whose families had fled from the mainland, but who themselves had been born and had grown up on Taiwan) finally faced reality. The maps were duly revised. People on Taiwan were astonished to learn that Outer Mongolia had suddenly become an independent country. They were equally stunned to see that the pathetic Chinese railway system existing at the end of WWII (there were more miles of railway in just Korea than in all of China in 1945) had been replaced by an extensive railway net across the entire country. They were further dumbfounded to see that there was not only one but several bridges across the Yangtze (the first was finished with Soviet help, but the others were built by the Chinese themselves). The dictionaries were also changed. The pejorative labels for PRC officials were dropped. And the central railway station was rebuilt, and when the construction was done the banner was not hung from it again. There are a couple of lessons I think we can derive from this case. The first is that it is foolhardy to deny reality. Applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is foolish for Hamas to deny Israel's existence. It is equally foolish for Hamas to dredge up a lot of tired, ridiculous anti-Semitic abuse and put in their charter. But this lesson actually cuts both ways. For many, many years, it was Israel that refused to negotiate with the PLO, and even went so far as to deny that there was any such thing as the Palestinian people (this was a favorite line of Golda Meir, for instance). In retrospect, this was a lost opportunity. If Israel had reached an accommodation with the Palestinians back in the late 1970s, it could have avoided several wars that have not gone well for it. It could have forestalled the rise of Hamas as a new political force (and as I indicated earlier, Israel in fact did the opposite, namely it idiotically gave Hamas aid at an early point in its history to create what it hoped would be a malleable alternative to the PLO). As a result of its refusal to face the inevitability of reaching a comprehensive and lasting peace with the Palestinians, Israel is now confronted with a set of very unpleasant choices, and this is a predicament that is largely of its own making. Another lesson is that in general a pissing match involves at least two parties. In the above case, the PRC had its own maps showing Taiwan as part of the PRC, and its own favored terms of abuse for the KMT, and its own silly propaganda about how everyone on Taiwan was subsisting on tree bark, in other words, the PRC line about Taiwan under the KMT presented the mirror image of KMT propaganda about the PRC. Then one day cooler heads prevailed and all this garbage was simply tossed out, by both sides. When I went back to Taiwan for a couple of months' stay at the Academia Sinica in 1992, one could buy anything published in the PRC, read the works of Mao and Lenin and Marx (something that in 1984 would have earned a ROC citizen a long stay in prison on the Green Island), and on and on. And despite the fears of some die-hards that democratization would lead to chaos, the ROC polity has actually survived and indeed flourished because of all the honesty, and Taiwan is a much more open a nd decent place today, and the PRC has largely changed for the better as well (though there are many, many problems in both countries, no two ways about it). And that is why I think it is foolish to harp solely on the language of the Hamas charter. It is the voice of a party that has only recently joined in a long pissing match, and the abusive language can only be understood in that broader context, just as the earlier PLO charter, which had similar language, could only be understood in the larger context. And that is also not to say that a peace agreement and the scrapping of the Hamas charter will result in the solution of all outstanding problems, or that individual Israelis and Palestinians will all become fast friends, any more than the peaceful co-existence of the PRC and ROC has resolved the many outstanding issues and problems of those two countries. But what is the alternative? It should be abundantly clear that Israel cannot survive over the long term without resolving the Palestinian question. The demographic and other pressures are inexorably working against it over the long haul. And this issue cannot be solved militarily, as the latest fighting in Gaza has shown once again. It has to be solved at the negotiating table. Finally, I have to object to your effort to tie Hamas to some kind of larger program of Islamic reconquest and re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate. As you must certainly know, Mark, 125 years ago there was only a handful of Jews in Palestine. The Zionists established Israel through various means, for example promotion of migration of East European Jewry to Palestine, the purchase of land from large (usually absentee) Arab landholders, support from colonial governments, particularly Great Britain, and finally assistance from the US and USSR at a crucial moment in the 1940s (including some weapons shipments from Czechoslovakia at a key moment in the late 1940s that gave Zionist forces an advantage on the battlefield). And in the late 1940s, the Zionists also cleared Palestine of approximately 750,000 Palestinians, through force and terror. Many of the people living in Gaza and the West Bank are in fact either the victims of this ethnic cleansing or their descendants, and placing the burden on Hamas for raising the issue, however vile its language may be, is simply wrong-headed, Mark. From Hamas' standpoint (and from the standpoint of all Palestinians, and much of the world for that matter), Israel was founded on the basis of a clear and unambiguous wrong, this dispossession of a people. Recognizing that wrong does not entail the conclusion that Israel should be destroyed. It simply means that reasonable people on both sides must sit down and find a suitable way to redress that wrong, and that is what the provisional Geneva Accord tries to do. Not doing so simply condemns both sides to continued conflict, and that is a dead end that will result only in more pointless waste of life on both sides. In sum, Hamas is not al-Qaeda, and it is really wrong of you to present it that way. It reminds me of the risible stuff circulated back in the Reagan years, when Claire Sterling wrote her silly book "The Terror Network", which made it seem like the PLO was nothing more than the Kremlin's cat's paw in the global struggle between capitalism and communism. Sorry, but it just ain't so. This conflict long antedates the Cold War, and antedates the rise of radical political Islam by an even longer period. It has always primarily been a nationalist struggle between two groups over the same territory, and presenting it as something else is either shodddy analysis or a conscious, bad faith effort to direct attention away from the real issues. I hope you at least can see that, Mark, even if some others on the list cannot. John Marchioro --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages prior to posting, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
