Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has now told the whole world what he told me (and a little before me, Joe Klein) on June 4.
Namely this (from Al-Jazeera):
- “We appreciate Obama’s new language towards Hamas. And it is the first step in the right direction toward a dialogue without conditions, and we welcome this,” he said.
Meshaal said that Obama’s words must be followed by action on the ground, mentioning that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to suffer under an Israeli blockade.
Occupation and injustice go on,” he said.
… Mashaal also called on Obama to pull out Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, the US security co-ordinator in the region, who is supervising the training of Palestinian forces in the West Bank.
What’s new there from what he told me is his spelling out that Hamas welcomes the movement toward a dialogue without [pre-]conditions. I think that was already highly implicit in what he told me. The Word Doc of the complete transcript of my interview with him is here.
I guess the other thing that’s notable about today’s statement is that it was addressed primarily to an Arabic-language audience. So it is significant, and of course good, that he’s saying the same things to both English-language and Arabic-language audiences.
So it is significant, and of course good, that he’s saying the same things to both English-language and Arabic-language audiences.
As opposed to 60 year of Arab leaders saying they want peace to the West in English and preparing their people for war and hatred in Arabic?
Reading your writing is like reading Pravda. We are left to parse your words to draw obvious, but unspoken conclusions.
Verouz,
If you want peace for a change open your eyes and your eyes, more importantly your heart, at the same time close your mouth .
Only then you will achieve peace.
The Right of Return that Hamas and the Pals are demanding is a complete joke, and would eliminate the idea of a Jewish State within 30 years, if not less What about all of the jews forced from a variety of countries in the Middle East simply for being Jews? I guess that they don’t count: in Hamas’s views, Jews really don’t count as people. Look at what they teach their children if you don’t believe me.
would eliminate the idea of a Jewish State within 30 years
Jeff, and you are surprised by this? You don’t think this is exactly what they want to achieve, not by accident, but by design?
The Arabs want an ethnically pure Palestinian state in the WB/Gaza, and a mixed “state of all its people” in Israel, with the potential to one day become a Palestinian state.
The two state solution is not a solution to conflict, merely its perpetuation through other means. The fundamental issue is what it has always been – Arabs will never accept Jewish sovereignty in the Levant. To this end, they will go so far as to deny that there is such a thing as a Jewish people, or that a Jewish Temple once stood on the Temple Mount. And that’s coming from the moderates!
Have you heard of Yaacov Lozowick? He used to run Yad Vashem and has his own blog, wrote a book, etc. He was involved in many projects with the Palestinians during Oslo to build civil society and mutual understanding. Here’s what he writes:
In July 2001, 9 months into the Jerusalem Intifada and four months into the Government of Ariel Sharon, a group of some two dozen intellectuals from both sides convened to build a bridge over the ruins of peace. These were all old friends who have been meeting for many years in hope of finding enough common ground to enable the politicians to pick up the torch. Back when they started, they were unpopular pariahs in their respective communities for daring to reach out to the enemy; but over years of perseverance they had managed to pull ever larger segments of their people behind them, and from eccentrics they had become mainstream. Between them there must have been many thousands of hours of dialogue. Intelligent, educated individuals, rational realists, there was not a hard-line militant among them.
Their idea was simple: to agree on a joint declaration calling on the warring factions to desist from their insanity and return to negotiations. The peaceniks would join hands, and with their moral authority embarrass the politicians back to sanity. The Palestinians were willing to join in stating that there should be two independent states alongside one another, but the Israelis, alerted by the fiascos of Camp David and Taba to a nuance they had previously overlooked, demanded that the statement clearly say that Israel would be a Jewish State and Palestine an Arab one. The Palestinians refused. Jews, they said, are a religion, not a nationality, and neither need nor deserve their own state. They were welcome to live in Israel, but the Palestinian refugees would come back, and perhaps she would cease to be a Jewish State.
Enough said.
‘Hamas and Pals” are Palestinians, if anything your words show the true jerk you are, it shows your perverted mentality .
The real Jewish person is a being who have empathy and sympathy toward the “other” . Shows respect and treat gentiles as the Jewish person like to be treated .
And, YES, they teach their children that the occupation is illegal . Colonization of a people and their land is illegal under international laws .
Have you ever asked yourself why will Israel give 250,000 foreign workers Israeli citizenship from the far East, while refute the right of return of the native Palestinians ?
Will that make it more Jewish ?
why will Israel give 250,000 foreign workers Israeli citizenship from the far East
Until the 2nd intifada, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians used to hold those jobs in Israel. Then Israeli buses and cafes started exploding at the hands of Palestinian terror groups, and the Israelis closed their borders to Palestinian labor. Now Vietnamese and Malaysians do the same work, without anyone worrying if they will stab you or have to check under their jacket for suspicious wires.
Tell me, N.Z., how many Palestinians have empathy for “the other”? How many Palestinians recognize that they are living on Jewish land, forcibly cleansed of Jewish life some 2000 years ago by Imperial Rome?
The answer to this question is complex. I was visiting Sinjil a couple of years back, and my Palestinian friend drove me to Jiljiliya, just down the road. He loves history and was an “unofficial observer” to an archeological dig near the village. Jiljiliya, he told me proudly, is Gilgal in Hebrew, the place where the first Jewish king, Saul, was chosen.
Palestinians in the villages have no problem acknowledging Jewish history to the land. To them it’s obvious – when they build homes, they go to the ruins and pick the stones up. Ruins of what? Ruins of Jewish villages. Yet, the Palestinian leadership cannot even acknowledge that there once stood a Jewish Temple at the Temple Mount.
As for Palestinian vs. Arab, it’s a silly argument. The people on the ground identify themselves as both Palestinian and Arab interchangeably.
An Open Letter to President Obama from Christian Peacemaker Teams: Call on Israel to Stop Its Violence against Palestinians
Well, Helen you ar doing such a good job of presenting and covering the situtation and facts you have attracted all the opposition to peace.
Never mind them.
I think Hamas has it together enough to work with Obama for their ultimate goal.
But of course that’s just the “impression” I have from the little bit we here get to hear from Hamas.
What’s your opinion? Do the have their ducks in a row?
How about another female perspective formed in Lebanon, just like Helena, only that this lady married a Christain instead of an Arab, and well she supports Israel unlike Helena, and consequently is under death threats unlike Helena:
“Among the most vocal is Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian who lectures worldwide about Israel’s valiant quest to preserve the ideals of democracy, authors best-selling books defending its right to exist and launched an organization devoted to warning the West against the dangers of Islamic fundamentalists…
Snip…. Cut for reasons of major length violation; off-topic violation; non-original content violation, etc.
Titus,
This sounds like a propaganda story planted by Mossad or other Israel organization working in the background. This woman may have existed in reality (one can easily understand that someone who has been cured by Israelian medics is grateful) but the story surely is hyped.
That said, concerning Helena, I wonder whether his first Lebanese husband wasn’t a Christian too ? I think she wrote that once. That said, your opposition of being Christian and being Arab is curious. There are several Christian Palestinians = Arabs.. One can be Arab and Christian at the same time. Christianism begun in Middleast before spreading to Roma and EU.
In the end, your only aim is to smear Helena, but with such inexact remarks, you are totally missing your objective.
Titus:
You do realize that Ms. Gabriel’s bio is a fairy tale, that the attacks on Maronites she speaks were retaliation for massacres of Palestinians and that the Israeli soldiers her mother convalesced with may well have been among those who had supported the slaughter by “Christains” at Shatila.
Had she and her mother been a Palestinian at Karantina …
She seems to me a hate-filled opportunist who has made a career of inspiring the ignorance that makes disastrous policy like the invasion of Iraq so easy to fob on the American public.
Titus, you reveal your huge ignorance about Middle Eastern matters when you assume there’s any contradiction at all between being Christian and being Arab. Who are the current-day descendants of Jesus’s very first converts to his new faith? And what was the religious makeup of the founders of Arab nationalism and Baathism?
You could maybe try to learn a little more about the region before you express yourself on matters you evidently know very little about?
Meanwhile, please let’s get back to the TOPIC of the post.