February 3, 2006
The Price Palestinians Must Pay
By Charles
Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Amid
much gnashing of teeth, the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections
is being called a disaster. On the contrary. It is deeply clarifying
and ultimately cleansing. If the world responds correctly, it
will mark a turning point for the better.
The Palestinian people
have spoken. According to their apologists, sure, Hamas wants
to destroy Israel, wage permanent war and send suicide bombers
into discotheques to drive nails into the skulls of young Israelis,
but what the Palestinians were really voting for was efficient
garbage collection.
It is time to stop
infantilizing the Palestinians. As Hamas leader Khaled Meshal
said in a news conference four days after the election, ``The
Palestinian people have chosen Hamas with its known stances.''
By a landslide, the Palestinian people have chosen these known
stances: rejectionism, Islamism, terrorism, rank anti-Semitism,
and the destruction of Israel in a romance of blood, death and
revolution. Garbage collection on Wednesdays.
Everyone is lamenting
the fall of Fatah and the marginalization of its leader Mahmoud
Abbas. This is ridiculous. The election exposed what everyone
knew and would not admit: Abbas has no constituency. Would it
have been better to keep funneling billions of dollars from the
EU and a gullible U.S. to the thoroughly corrupt administration
of a hapless figurehead? Billions that either end up in Swiss
bank accounts or subsidize countless gangs of young men carrying
guns?
The current nostalgia
for Fatah moderation is absurd. What moderation? Yasser Arafat's
1993 paper recognition of Israel's right to exist was as fraudulent
as his famous Oslo side letter renouncing terrorism. He spent
the next seven years clandestinely sponsoring terror, then openly
launched a four-year terror war, the most vicious in the history
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
With this election,
we can no longer hide from the truth: After 60 years, the Palestinian
people continue to reject the right of a Jewish state to exist
side-by-side with them. Fatah -- secular, worldly and wise --
learned to lie to the West and pretend otherwise. Hamas -- less
sophisticated, more literal and more bound by religious obligation
to expel the Jews -- is simply more honest.
This election was
truth in advertising. Now we know. What to do?
The world must impress
upon the Palestinians that there are consequences for their choices.
And so long as they choose rejectionism -- the source of a 60-year
conflict the Israelis have long been ready to resolve -- the world
will not continue to support and subsidize them.
And that means cutting
off Hamas completely: no recognition, no negotiation, no aid,
nothing. And not just assistance to a Hamas government, but all
assistance. The Bush administration suggests continuing financial
support for ``humanitarian'' services. This is a serious mistake.
First, because money
is fungible. Every dollar we spend for Palestinian social services
is a dollar freed up for a Hamas government to purchase rockets,
guns and suicide belts for the ``Palestinian army'' that Meshal
has already declared he intends to build.
Second, because it
sends the Palestinians precisely the wrong message. If they were
under a dictatorship that imposed rejectionism upon them, there
would be a case for helping a disenfranchised Palestinian people.
But they just held the most open and honest exercise of democracy
in Palestinian history. The Palestinian people chose. However
much they love victimhood, they are not victims here. They are
actors. And historical actors have to take responsibility.
They want blood and
death and romance? They will get nothing. They choose peace and
coexistence? Then, as President Bush pledged in June 2002, they
will get everything: world recognition, financial assistance,
their own state with independence and dignity.
In August 2001, Hamas
sent a suicide bomber into a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. He
killed 15 innocent Israelis, mutilating many dozens more. A month
later, Hamas student activists at al-Najah University in Nablus
celebrated the attack with an exhibit, a mockup of the smashed
Sbarro shop strewn with blood and fake body parts -- a severed
leg, still dressed in jeans; a human hand dangling from the ceiling.
The inscription (with a reference to the Qassam military wing
of Hamas) read: ``Qassami Pizza is more delicious.''
The correct term
for such a mentality is not militance, not extremism, but moral
depravity. The world must advise the Palestinian people that if
their national will is to embrace Hamas -- its methods and its
madness -- then their national will is simply too murderous and,
yes, too depraved for the world to countenance, let alone subsidize.
The essential first
lesson of any newborn democracy is that national choices have
national consequences. A Hamas-led Palestine, cut off entirely,
will be forced to entertain second thoughts.
©
2006, Washington Post Writers Group
