Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: 'Abbas claims Zionists, Nazis linked before WWII' [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)While the man is no saint, he's far more moderate than anybody within Hamas.
You can't seriously suggest that the Israeli government shouldn't negotiate with ANYBODY in any of the current Palestinian leadership groups.
They tried that all through the 1980's...in case you've forgotten, refusing to accept the existing Palestinian leadership as a legitimate negotiating partner then had NO POSITIVE RESULTS AT ALL. It gained Israel nothing. It cost not only thousands of Palestinian lives, but many, many Israeli lives as well.
And no alternative leadership EVER emerged that would ever have accepted what Israel was demanding at the time...a complete surrender of the right to self-determination(or settling for Begin's proposal for Tibetan-style autonomy, which was exactly the same thing).
I'd have preferred someone like Hanan Ashrawi to be leading the Palestinian side...but even SHE would have insisted on at least partial RoR, and East Jerusalem, and the end of the settlements. Neither she, nor anyone else who could ever have emerged as a possible Palestinian leader, would ever have accepted Likudnik terms for the end of the conflict.
And even if someone like her had emerged, Israel was STILL going to have to get buy-in from the armed resistance factions within the Palestine for any peace agreement to be worth the price of the paper it was printed on...so the PLO then(and Hamas now, with its horrible flaws)would have to be brought into it in some way. It was never possible to militarily crush them and have that be the end of it.
So, again, what was, or is, the alternative to negotiations involving the groups with the weapons? What else could ever have worked or could ever work in the future?