By David Bedein
January 27, 2006
Over the past month, our news agency has been facilitating a documentary film on the subject of the Hamas, in which our colleagues interviewed Hamas leaders who serve prison sentences prison for dispatching people to commit acts of murder. Their victims -- men , women and children of all ages -- were killed in cold blood in shopping centers, schools , coffee shops, open air markets, or in their living room at home.
Each of these Hamas leaders openly said that they expect to be free very soon, that they expect to resume their "operations", that they have no regrets for their actions, and that their purpose is to overthrow the State of Israel and to replace it with an "Islamic State of Palestine".
These Hamas leaders spoke calmly, with self-confidence, and were pleased to pose for the cameras after each interview.
And now these very Hamas leaders have won the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, following an 18 year process of cooperation between Hamas and the PLO, which had been the dominant party in the nascent Palestinian Authority.
Hamas, founded in 1987, and the PLO, founded in 1964, work with the same funding source: Saudi Arabia, one of the Arab nations that had attacked Israel in 1948 to destroy the news Jewish state. Saudi Arabia has never signed a peace treaty (like Jordan and Egypt) and has never even signed an armistice (like Syria and Lebanon)
Meanwhile, the PLO has nurtured Hamas for leadership in a Palestinian state.
As the Oslo process gathered momentum, the PLO cooperation with Hamas's popular movement was conducted in the open, yet hardly reported.
When Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Peres and PLO leader Yassir Arafat all got a joint Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 1994, I asked Rabin and Peres if Arafat would crush Hamas and cancel the PLO covenant calling for Israel's destruction. Peres and Rabin held their own press conference and assured the media that they had ironclad commitment from Arafat to crush Hamas and to cancel the PLO covenant which calls for Israel's gradual destruction.
However, when I asked Arafat the same questions, he laughed at the idea that he was supposed to "crush the Hamas" and instead described Hamas as "my brothers" and denied any assurance that he would cancel the PLO covenant.
250 news agencies heard Arafat's answer. Not one reported it.
Four months later, in April, 1995, after intense negotiations between the PLO and Hamas, Arafat committed himself to licensing and distributing weapons for the Hamas. At the time, the Voice of Israel Radio had reported that Arafat was "confiscating the weapons" from the Hamas, as did the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Yet on May 9th, 1995, The PA held a ceremony in which it formally distributed weapons to Hamas in an event was reported on the Voice of Palestine radio, and picked up by the New York Times.
Yet the story was relegated to the back pages of Israeli newspapers and, to this day, most people to this day do not know that Hamas is armed by the Palestinian Authority.
In December, 1995. the PA and Hamas reached a cooperative agreement in Cairo to absorb Hamas into the framework of the Palestinian Authority, after which the PA ceded the all important position of "minister of communications" to an Hamas official.
However, the PLO--HAMAS Cairo agreement was carried out in the weeks that followed the assassination of Rabin, and the impact on public opinion was not really felt. The Cairo Agreement was also relegated to the back pages of the media.
After the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian Camp David negotiations in the summer of 2000, two key PLO members and officials of the PA -- Muhammad Dahlan and Marwan Barghouti -- established a "joint military command" with the Hamas -- in a cooperative agreement to carry out murder activities in a coordinated fashion, with no pretense of a "good cop" for the Fatah and "bad cop" for the Hamas.
Only this past week, on the last day of the PA political campaign, one of the founders of the PLO, PA foreign minister Nabil Shaath, promised that he would "never disarm the Hamas".
Meanwhile, the PA state constitution, adopted by the Palestinian Legislative Council, a full three years before the Hamas electoral victory this week, mandates that a future Palestinian State will be based on Sharia Islamic law, modeled on Saudi Arabia and Iran, in which there is no juridical status for Jews.
In other words, the PA constitution is quite compatible with the Hamas Charter. The cooperation between the PLO and Hamas will continue unabated.
On the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the first government authority since the Third Reich has been established to sanction and execute the cold blooded murder of Jews. But it would be self-delusional to think that this represents a significant change in the policies of the Palestinian Authority.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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