Hamas’ win in January’s Palestinian elections “must be taken for what it is: a fairly contested vote for war,” believes Amotz Asa-El, former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post.
“[I have] argued consistently for nearly half a decade [that] the Palestinians’ real leaders are not the Palestinian Authority, but Hamas,” he wrote in his Feb. 2, 2006, column, “Middle Israel.”
“The prosaic fact is that Hamas won regardless of us; it won because the Palestinian leaders who went to Oslo never began to even reluctantly re-educate their people to stop hating Jews, to accept them as worthy neighbors and to accept them as indigenous inhabitants of their ancestral land.”
And that carries serious consequences, said Asa-El this week during a telephone interview with The Chronicle. Not least is the Israeli government’s recent decision to withhold monthly tax payments of $50 million.
“I think there is a broad consensus in favor of this move among Israelis. Hamas remains unreconstructed; it denies the right of Israel’s very existence and it has personally planned the murders of many Israeli children,” he said.
“Their choice is to let Hamas rule them. They are choosing to fight and we have to fight. And we should not appease them. We must not delude ourselves, as we did with Arafat, that they are choosing peace.”
In early March, Asa-El will discuss this and other issues about Israeli politics, media and Diaspora Jewry during a series of talks arranged and sponsored by the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning.
Asa-El was previously the Post’s business editor, news editor and editor of its overseas edition, the International Jerusalem Post. He has also been foreign editor of the Telegraph financial daily in Tel Aviv and a foreign correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle.
He is also considered an expert on the Diaspora and Jewish dispersal’s geographic patterns. In 2004 he published a best-selling book “The Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel.”
Civil war dangers
Another aspect of the Israeli “matzav,” the term used to describe the overall situation, that Asa-El regularly addresses is the danger of civil war in Israel.
With a sophisticated historical perspective — he holds advanced degrees in history and journalism from Columbia University and Hebrew University and has taught Jewish history at Brandeis and Hebrew Universities — he sees dangerous divisions festering in Israel.
Among the most deeply alienated and disenfranchised Israelis are the Gaza evacuees and those who sympathize with them. Although poor Israelis who have suffered from Sharon’s Reagan-style policies also feel disenfranchised, Asa-El said, government leaders have reached out to them by visiting a soup kitchen and showing concern for their plight.
“But no reaching out like this has happened with the Gaza settlers” and the government must address this issue, he said.
Asa-El said that the settler movement is radically separate from the Israeli majority, including religious Israelis. “Most religious Israelis are able to separate their religious beliefs from their rational view of the conflict.
“But these people who have taken over the settler cause are committed to the belief that not one grain of the Promised Land can be given up for peace. They have taken over the settler cause and led it to tragedy.”
In the recent conflict between Israeli police and settlers in Amona, in the West Bank, most of the settlers involved were high school kids “in skullcaps and maxi skirts — lovely, innocent people” who mostly don’t understand how politically beleagured and socially marginalized they are, he said.
“They need to come to terms with the way that Ariel Sharon took [their acceptable status] away from them when he abandoned their cause and took Israel in a different direction. The effect on them has been profound,” he said.
Asa-El will speak about “World Media and the Middle East” at a lunch program on March 5 that is co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning, The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle and the Milwaukee Press Club.
Held at the Newsroom Pub, 137 E. Wells St., the noon event is open to the public and will include a kosher catered lunch. Cost is $10 for members of the WSJL and press club; $15 for the public. To register, contact the press club at milwaukeepressclub@gmail.com or 414-588-9571.
That evening, at 7:30 p.m., he will speak at a community program, to be held at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun. His topic will be “There’s More to the Jews than Ashkenazi and Sephardi: Diaspora Jewry and the Lost Tribes of Israel.” That event is co-sponsored by WSJL, The Chronicle, Emanu-El and Alverno College.
During the week, he will speak with various groups in Milwaukee and Madison.
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