André Brie, April 20, 2006, Near East, for Politician's Screen

Is this a desired-for insolubility?

Since the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine, the dilemma is complete. These were - also according to the evaluation of the international electoral observers - the first democratic and fair elections in an Arab country. However, no one seems to be able to live with the result. The tragic victim is the idea of democratisation in the Arabic world. The international demands to the Hamas - recognition of the right to exist of Israel and of the negotiation results up to now as well as renunciation to violence - are natural and necessary. For many Palestinian women and men, their own vote is even more problematic. With Hamas, there has succeeded an organisation with a reactionary image of women; the secular and pluralistic intellectual and cultural landscape is already now threatened by the obvious readiness to censorship of the new cultural minister. Legislature and government, on the one hand, as well as President and PLO on the other (where the Hamas is not member, who is, however, internationally, also diplomatically, recognised as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinians) oppose each other with hostility; with the cutting of the financial support by the USA, the EU and Japan for the Palestinian autonomy authority, as well as the holding back of the Palestinian taxes and tariffs by Israel,  the anyway disastrous economic and social situation is once more exacerbated dramatically, there threaten in the briefest interval political chaos and civil war.

The  day-long, massive Israeli grenade and rocket attacks against the Gaza strip as well as the inexcusable blood bath of the Palestinian suicide attempt in Tel Aviv offer to the respectively opposite side additional reasons for the escalation of violence and hatred. It is a policy by all the concerned that provokes precisely what one has always expected of the other in terms of negative response. The Hamas victory has various origins. Last but not least it is a reaction to the political and economic failure of the old Fatah administration and its corruption. Yet it is also a desperate response to the humiliation and the ignorance of the West face to the Palestinians and their elementary misery. On occasion of my visit last week in the occupied territories, I have heard cynical, irresponsible, and dumb arguments by Hamas politicians. The horrible high point was the statement by the new speaker (president) of the Palestine parliament Aziz Duaek (Hamas) that the Jews had had to suffer six years of Holocaust, the Palestinians already six decades. This must be consequently refused. Nevertheless, you have to travel there, get to know the miserable daily life of these people and concretely experience the mercilessly comprehensive consequences of the Israeli wall and the security fence that only in part separates Israelis and Palestinians from one another, much more so, however, and ten-thousand-fold the Palestinians from each other and from their relatives, fields, markets, jobs, schools and hospitals. Israel's security, free and democratic development are an axiom of any responsible international politics. Yet double standards face to Israel and to the Palestinians in the keeping of international law, the resolutions of the Security Council, the Road Map, and in the matter of human rights will not be acceptable and politically clearly counter-productive, if it is really to be a matter of democracy and readiness for compromise on the Palestinian side.

It should also be respected what the end to the Western financial aid will mean concretely. After all, they are not aimed at the government, but at a people that is suffering from terrible political and social conditions. It is correct, but all too easily said that it is impossible to support a government that does not consequently abjure terror. Undoubtedly, the declaration of the Hamas cannot be accepted that the blood bath in Tel Aviv has been an act of self-defence. However, why is no thought given to directly financing civilian, economic, and humanitarian projects and to pay out the money by way of the World Bank in such a way that the 150,000 employees receive their salaries directly? This concerns thousands of teachers, physicians, administrative employees and policemen. Taking account of family members, it is a matter of the social existence of more than a million people. Can someone after all have an interest in there being a civil war between the still Fatah-dominated Palestinian security that have not received their wages since March and the Hamas government? Do we then want to feel confirmed in our opinion that the Palestinians are not capable of democracy and of peace? That now Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Qatar will jump in financially, does not make the situation any better.

In my opinion, the justified demands to the Hamas will be effective only, when similar demands are also addressed to Israel and to the international community. On April 10, in the small Palestinian town of Anata, there met soldiers and officers of the Israeli army and fighters of the Palestinians for a new peace initiative. The site was symbolic: the courtyard of a Palestinian school, across which there had been drawn the concrete wall, eight meters high at that particular point, of the Israeli security installation. They talked about the fruitful experiences that they had made with one another, yet of course did not justify that way in no way the continuation of violence and hostility, but the indispensability to get out of that spiral, in which action and reaction are no longer distinguishable and to refuse themselves to a logic that only causes what they allegedly or in fact want to prevent. Breaking out of the logic of being always in the right - that has been wrong-headed for decades and is leading into the abyss - this change of attitude among the politically responsible in Israel and in Palestine, in the EU and in the USA in my opinion is the only way out. That much courage after all should also be mustered by people, who do not, like Israeli and Palestinian soldiers, have to pay for that with partly serious personal consequences up to and including prison sentences.