Say ‘yes’ to the ‘hudna’ – And let the haggling begin!

On those mornings when I take a bus from my southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot to the Post offices on the other side of town, I always scan my fellow passengers – checking for suicide bombers. Several years ago, a colleague found himself sharing a ride with a randy “martyr” on his way to collect 70 virgins.

Perhaps that’s why I found myself receptive to an op-ed in Thursday’s International Herald Tribune calling for a hudna. The piece had been written by one Ahmed Yousef, “a senior adviser to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.”

I have to confess, I had never paid much attention to Yousef. He appears to be a Hamas liaison to the foreign press on such issues as the elusive Palestinian unity government, non-recognition of Israel and the exchange of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. The Christian Science Monitor calls him a “moderate.”

Yousef’s op-ed (which also ran in The New York Times) is part of a larger charm offensive. The Foreign Office in London facilitated visas to allow Yousef and another Hamas member, Said Abu Musameh, to hold private meetings and be interviewed by journalists.

Yousef came pushing the hudna, telling the Guardian: “We hope Europeans will become aware of the concept of hudna, and that it can become a substitute for recognition of Israel. Debate about a political nation’s right to exist seems infantile. Israel is a state now, it is part of the UN, it is de facto there, and we deal with it every day.”

In his op-ed, after explaining what a hudna is and why it is acceptable under Islamic jurisprudence, Yousef pledges that “when Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God, and will therefore keep it.”

Yousef continues: “This offer of hudna is no ruse – as some assert – to strengthen our military machine, to buy time to organize better or to consolidate our hold on the Palestinian Authority.
“We Palestinians are prepared to enter into a hudna to bring about an immediate end to the occupation and to initiate a period of peaceful coexistence during which both sides would refrain from any form of military aggression or provocation.

“During this period of calm and negotiations we can address the important issues like the right of return and the release of prisoners. The next generation of Palestinians and Israelis will have to decide whether or not to renew the hudna and the search for a negotiated peace.”

I’M NO adviser to the prime minister, but my first inclination – mindful of the politics of the bazaar – is to say: you want a hudna, you got a hudna.

Now, let’s talk details.

Our Foreign Ministry is hung up with getting Hamas to unequivocally recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce terrorism and embrace commitments the Palestinian Arabs made under the 1993 Oslo Accords. I’m not much bothered about such things. After all, Yasser Arafat demonstrated that one can “renounce” terrorism while engaging in it; “recognize” Israel’s right to exist while trying to bomb us to smithereens, and sit for photo-ops with visiting peace delegations while brainwashing Palestinian children to hate Jews.

Maybe the problem was that we tried to cut a deal with Palestinian factions that couldn’t deliver their people. We ought to abandon such impotent and disingenuous partners and do business with the people that can deliver.

And considering how little our earlier peace efforts have actually accomplished, we might as well start from scratch.


LET’S RESPOND by offering the Palestinian Arabs a Jewish hudna: 10 years of tranquility for the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria. If they stop all violence from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – no drive-by shootings, no rock-throwing, no firebombs, no bus or cafe bombings (you get the idea) from any Palestinian source – Israel will offer peace and quiet.

If the other side can live without smuggling weapons and without training its young people for the next round of warfare, if it can retool its schools to teach hudna instead of intolerance, we should meet them halfway.

Of course, we can’t withdraw to the suicidal armistice lines of 1949 (which some call the 1967 borders), but we can commit ourselves to genuinely freezing the territorial expansion of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (we can always build higher); we can remove outposts not approved by the government; we can make it as easy to travel from Ramallah to Gaza as it is to journey from Safed to Eilat.

Naturally, we will never agree to the “right of return” of the refugees (and their descendants) who left this land generations ago, but we can – with EU and US help – help those in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the territories demolish their refugee camps and build permanent housing; we can facilitate the building of industries in Palestinian Arab population centers; we can even welcome Palestinian Arabs back into Israel proper for business and pleasure.

And, assuming the Palestinians do deliver, devoting themselves for the next 10 years to rebuilding their morally, politically and economically devastated society, relearning humane values and rediscovering a spiritualism that’s not fixated on blood, I predict they will find most Israelis willing to compromise – even to the point of helping create a Palestinian Arab state.
So, were I advising our premier, I’d urge him to invite Haniyeh to Jerusalem and start the hudna haggling.

Time for the IDF to launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza?

My gut instinct tells me it would be a mistake to launch a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The enemy would like nothing more than to tie down tens of thousands of IDF troops in the alleyways of the refugee camps and in the urban slums of Gaza. They’ve reportedly been training and laying traps for precisely such a step.

An IDF move into Gaza would also halt the internecine warfare among the various Palestinian militias, clans, and terrorist organizations, instantly uniting them against Israel.

No. We need to fight this war by exploiting our strengths not playing into enemy hands which would have us fight in crowded cities and camps.

I think what we’ve been doing until now in response to Palestinian aggression is roughly the right approach. We’ve aimed to kill Kassam launch teams and some of the people who send them. We’ve destroyed ammunition dumps and the factories that make the Kassams.

It’s frustrating that we haven’t been able to stop all rocket and missile launching from Gaza.

But more than 300 enemy combatants (and, regrettably, noncombatants) have been killed since Gilad Shalit was captured. I would not call that sitting on our hands.

We do need to accelerate our efforts along the Philadelphi Corridor – something we’ve begun to do. Still, it will be an immense task to reduce the flow of weapons coming in via the tunnels from Sinai.

That's because the Egyptians are part of the problem by failing to police their side of the Gaza-Sinai border.

We need to be methodical and smart in dealing with Gaza; let’s keep hammering away whenever an opportunity presents itself – by land, sea, and air.

But for now, I say “no” to a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Time to invade Gaza?

Ramadan realities

Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, ends next Monday at sunset with the festival of Id al-Fitr. Muslims worldwide have been marking the “handing down” of the Koran through obligatory daytime fasting.

These last days of the month are filled with heightened religious significance making it – for Islamists – a fine time for “martyring.”

Last Friday, as Jews were preparing to usher in Shmini Atzeret, some 200,000 Muslim worshippers were attending prayers in the Aksa Mosque compound – which just happens to also be the Temple Mount. Roughly half of the worshippers were West Bank Palestinians – women and men older than 45. Age limits are imposed because of security concerns.

Thousands of other West Bank Arabs were prevented from reaching Jerusalem because the authorities feared they would use the opportunity to do more than pray.

Sure enough, clashes were reported between security forces and stone-throwing Palestinians demanding entrance to Jerusalem, at the Kalandiya checkpoint north of the city, and near Bethlehem in the south. Some Palestinians even tried to scale the security barrier now protecting part of the capital’s perimeter.


MUSLIM RELIGIOUS ardor has gradually supplanted both Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism as the mobilizing force in Palestinian society. This makes any hope of an Arab-Israeli modus vivendi ever more remote.

The Palestinian cause is a central pillar of the Muslim complaint against the West. Why? The Islamist war against Western civilization is a war against modernity – representative government, pluralism, tolerance, gender equality, sexual liberation and rationalism. And for Islamists, Israel – stuck in their midst – is modernity incarnate.

More than anything else, the return of the Jewish people to this land and the establishment of our nation-state in 1948 galvanized Arab intellectuals in their battle with the West, already in progress.

This season’s must-read book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, includes the reaction of Sayyid Qutb, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and a guiding spirit of today’s Islamists, to president Harry S Truman’s support for bringing Holocaust refugees to Palestine: “I hate those Westerners [for wanting to bring European Jews to the Arab Middle East] and despise them! All of them, without any exception: the English, the French, the Dutch and finally the Americans, who have been trusted by many.”

SO WHAT do we do in the face of such relentless religious hatred, which has not abated?
What I like to call the irrational Right would have Israel take an adversarial position: Don’t “appease.” Confront.

That’s the idea encapsulated in National Union-National Religious Party MK Uri Ariel’s call for building a synagogue on the Temple Mount.

A new group with the apparent backing of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz claims to have reestablished the Sanhedrin, originally an august assembly of venerable, God-inspired sages. Their seeming mission is to hasten the rebuilding of the Third Temple.

Call me chicken, but I don’t think six million Jews should go out of their way to further antagonize 300 million Arabs – not to mention the one billion Muslims who stand behind them in order to hasten the rebuilding of the Temple. I’d like to leave that job to God.

THE IRRATIONAL Left is equally misguided in advocating a return – “with adjustments” – to the 1949 armistice lines (which they like to call “the 1967 borders”). They’d rely on Arab and international goodwill to favorably interpret the picayune matter of the “right of return,” which, they say, we should accept “in principle.”

So if, in the face of resurgent Islam and an intransigent Palestinian Arab foe, we ought neither to rebuild the Temple nor withdraw to borders that are less than 15 km. wide in some places – what should we do?

I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s lament about coming to a crossroads where “one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

We’ve tried negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas when he was in power – to no avail.

We’ve tried unilateralism and disengagement and that seems to have backfired.

We’ve tried improving the economic situation of the Palestinian Arabs on the theory that people with a stake in their future tend not to blow themselves up. Or send others to do it.

But the problem is that Palestinian leaders do not really want their people to stop suffering. The last thing they want is to turn Gaza into Hong Kong or the West Bank into Singapore. And anyway, for the Ismail Haniyehs of Palestine, deprivation isn’t the crux of the problem – it’s a symptom that will go away when modernity is vanquished.

Sayyid Qutb, mentioned earlier – an educator who traveled widely across the United States in the 1950s when few Egyptians had the opportunity to leave their home villages – rejected modernity and all its trappings (well, OK, he held on to his classical music record collection).

Al-Qaida mastermind Ayman Zawahiri grew up in a middle-class Cairo neighborhood and went on to become a physician, continuing a family tradition.

Palestinian firebrand Edward Said attended an exclusive boys’ prep school in Cairo. Gaza-based Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was also a physician.


BOTTOM LINE? About the best we can do is not make things worse via reckless security concessions or needlessly exacerbating our already-fraught relations with the Arabs through acts of hubris.

One thing we can do is bolster that rare commodity, the Arab moderate. It’s in that context that I support Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s decision to allow King Abdullah II of Jordan the privilege of constructing a fifth minaret on the Temple Mount.

And we can hope – and, for those inclined, pray – that the international community will at long last come to the realization that the Palestinian polity is not yet ready for statehood. That what’s needed is a concerted Western effort to politically socialize the next generation in Gaza and the West Bank to the mores and responsibilities that are a prerequisite to statehood. If this sounds condescending, then maybe you don’t appreciate the reality of Palestinian society.

And we can pray – for that far-off day when Islam taps into its rich civilizational traditions in order to move from today’s drift toward the fanatical Salafist stream toward a reformation that would allow it to thrive in a religiously and politically heterogenous world.