JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL PARTY:

Gilad Shalit deal boosts Hamas in West Bank as Fatah clings to support (Rebecca Collard, October 18, 2011,  CSMonitor.com)

The common refrain is that the deal will embolden Hamas, but the deal may be a signal that the group is more likely to take the opposite tack: moderation. Naji Shurrab, a professor of political science at Gaza's Al Azhar University says this deal could be an indication that Hamas's approach is changing.

"Hamas is seeking international and regional support," says Dr. Shurrab, adding that Fatah and Hamas will need to reconcile to achieve their goals. Hamas's willingness to negotiate with Israel, even indirectly, shows that it is becoming more moderate. "It is showing Europe, the US, and even Israel that it's ready to open the door."

MORE:
Gershom Gorenberg: The Unmaking of Israel (Saul Austerlitz, 10/17/11, The National)

Gorenberg is no anti-Zionist firebrand, rather his critique of Israeli policy stems from a long-standing belief, expressed most powerfully in his essential 2006 book The Accidental Empire, that the unexpected success of the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, seen unanimously by Israelis at the time as a near-miracle, has proved a mixed blessing. Ignoring the warnings of some, maps were redrawn, religious zealots were encouraged, and the land itself made an object of worship. The miracle masked a silent accommodation to injustice: "Gradually, without public debate, with no formal declaration, the 'constructive solution' was patched together: for practical purposes, settlers and settlements were annexed to Israel. Palestinians lived under military occupation."

Orthodox himself, Gorenberg is particularly astute on the relationship between religion and politics, and much of Unmaking is devoted to the collusion between right-wing politicians and the ultra-Orthodox camps. The settlement movement created a new brand of ultra-rightist zealots toting a wildly distorted view of Judaism, but the rot did not stop there. The ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist and historically disinclined to engage with secular governments, were drafted to populate the settlements through subsidised housing and financial support for a separatist school system that purposefully left its students unable to compete in the secular world. "The moment a boy studies English," the principal of an ultra-Orthodox school in the West Bank tells Gorenberg, "he's more exposed to the wider world, and he naturally leaves religion and he can even engage in intermarriage, like in America." With 65 per cent of ultra-Orthodox men unemployed (and mostly unemployable) as of 2008, the ultra-Orthodox increasingly reside in "a land of posters denouncing television, internet and rival religious factions; of lifelong Torah study for men and countless pregnancies for women; of schools that provide scant preparation for earning a living and no preparation at all for participating in a democratic society". The longer a pyramid scheme continues, Gorenberg says of the ultra-Orthodox world, "the more people are caught up in it, the more difficult maintaining it becomes, and the more catastrophic is its looming collapse".

Successive Israeli governments, leftist and rightist alike, have quietly supported the settlers, allowing for such outrages as a pre-military academy, meant to recruit religious-nationalist students for military service, constructed in an illegal West Bank settlement. By infusing religious schools with government funds, and granting exclusive rights over marriage, divorce, conversion, and other rituals to an ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, Israel has empowered a flagrantly anti-democratic, religiously discriminatory minority. The chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces pronounced in 2009 (the year of the incursion into Gaza) that a soldier who "keeps his sword from blood" is "cursed". And the rabbi of a right-wing school financially supported by the government declared regarding students arrested for attacking Palestinians that "any trial based on the assumption that Jews and [non-Jews] are equal is a total travesty of justice".

Posted by oj at October 19, 2011 6:49 AM
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