by Dr. Joseph Lerner, co-director IMRA

In the interview whch follows Rashid Khalidi, Director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institutre and Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, welcomes Hamas’ election victory as deserved and as presenting an opportunity to calm the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by a long-term truce. He asserts that Hamas brought terrorism to the conflict and insists that this should not interfere with its potential to serve the long-term truce. Khalidi attacks Bush for taking a “messianic” stand against terrorism.

Although Hamas won the election on internal issues such as corruption, Khalidi insists “resistance” (terrorism) will persist so long as there is occupaton. So, terrorism’s support is not confined to a few, but characterizes the Palestinian population.

As for Abbas, he is a figure head. Although not stated, it follows that Israeli-Palestinian negotiation would be a sham.

Khalidi believes that given a suitable electoral victory Olmert “… may go beyond the limits of Sharon’s thinking”.

It should be recalled that Palestinian moderates opposed suicide bombing as being counter-productive, damaging the Palestinian international reputation and so interfering with achieving national objectives. Khalidi, in effect, completely disagrees. His interview signifies a public relations victory for Hamas , considering his prestigious academic position. Those who hope that Arab intellectuals in the West would induce reasonableness to the Palestinian scene are being proved wrong, either by silence from the Arab intellectual community or by positions such as thatenunciated by Khalidi.

Well before the election it was widely held that Hamas did not qualify to run in a democratic election. The United States and Israel made a profound error in permitting Hamas to run and assuring the world the consequence, if Hamas won, would be dealt with after the election.

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THE DAILY STAR (Lebanon) 7 Mar.’06: “Khalidi: World community is not willing to do what is necessary to advance Middle East peace process”

HEADING:”Arab-american academic says resistance will continue, in some form, as long as there is occupation” [IMRA: Except where not clearly indicated in Khalidi’s answer, the interviewer’s questions were omitted.]

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Editor’s note: Below is an interview with Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute and Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, was conducted by cfr.org, the online branch of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, and is published by permission. . . .

I was not surprised that Hamas did extremely well. I have been watching the declining … Fatah for a very long time, … this has been expected by anybody who’s been watching … downhill for Fatah, and uphill for Hamas. I did not … expect the level of ineptitude shown by the Fatah campaign,… Nor did I realize the degree to which the electoral system would affect the outcome, so that in the half of the seats that were distributed according to proportional representation, Fatah and Hamas were almost even, 44 percent against 42 percent. But in the seats that were distributed on a constituency basis, the most votes winning a district, Hamas cleaned Fatah out. … . . . . … People voted for Hamas for several reasons. One is the corruption of Fatah. The second is the ineptitude of Fatah on negotiations with Israel, and the fact that 15 years of negotiations and of peace processes and of establishment of the [Palestinian] Authority, and then the intifada, have left the Palestinians much worse off than they were before. … not just in terms of corruption. It was also the fact that Fatah failed to improve people’s conditions. They failed in their negotiations with Israel… getting a terrible deal. So a lot of people who do not subscribe to Hamas’ charter or many of Hamas’ ideas want a much tougher negotiating … . … What is going to happen? … starving the Palestinians will have the same result that it’s had in the past, which is to create more problems. … The second thing … a lot has to do with how people deal with the Palestinian political system. There are people making sweeping statements: “The president has no importance, what’s important is the prime minister; If you have this kind of a legislature, then you have this kind of a state,” which have no basis in reality. … This is a system in evolution. The role, authority, and prerogatives of the president, of the prime minister, and so forth, of the legislative branch, the executive branch, are not defined. . . . …, American aid is so minimal it really doesn’t matter. The only question is whether the United States is going to prevent other donors from giving money to the Palestinian Authority. American aid does not go generally to the Authority anyway. It goes multilaterally through the World Bank, through AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development], or through the United Nations. …multilateral institutions over which the United States has influence, like the World Bank and the European Union, Japan, and even donors in the Arab world, may well be influenced by American pressure … without that external funding the very precarious structure of the Palestinian Authority and … the Palestinian economy will really collapse. Q: … The Europeans have put Hamas on the terrorist list just as the United States has. Now, how terrorist is Hamas? A: Well, I’m not particularly comfortable with any of these categories. … American law, and … r European law, which bans dealing with people because of a certain kind of action, is … self-defeating. I think there are ways of weaning people away from undesirable actions, including terrorism, which are probably more intelligent than the ways in which we’re going about it. … you have to deal with a group that has won an election, whether they have done things that are terrorist or not…. Suicide bombing, in the last decade and a half, was pioneered by Hamas. I don’t know how much more terrorist you can get, if you’re talking about violence directed against civilians. That and aerial bombardment are the worst you can get. But talking … about what Palestinians do since they don’t have fighter planes, or helicopters, or drones, there’s no question that Hamas has not just been engaged in this, Hamas has in many ways been the motor of a specific kind of terrorism directed at Israeli civilians. It’s been very narrowly directed against Israelis … but it has been not just a contributor to this. Hamas initiated this in the Palestinian arena in the mid-90s. … the only reason there’s been a ceasefire for the past year, with all of the breakdowns that have occurred … has been because Hamas has held its fire. They’ve been much more committed to this than … Islamic Jihad or… military wing of Fatah. … If you think of it as a behavior that is unacceptable and heinous but which can be stopped, then I think what people should be doing is not just looking at whether Hamas carried out terrorism in the past, … but whether it’s amenable to stopping it permanently … . … look at other examples. … Ireland and … at Israel. We have to look at two of the most distinguished prime ministers in modern Israeli history, who were bloodthirsty terrorists according to their opponents. … Begin and Yitzak Shamir … both regarded as terrorist groups by the British mandate powers]. … . I wonder about this semi-religious use of the term “terrorism.” … once a terrorist, always a terrorist, and the only way to deal with them is to extirpate them. There is that messianic strain in the Bush administration. There are some Israelis in positions of power, who seem to have that attitude, and then there are other people in Israel who have a much more nuanced understanding of this. . . . … If your benchmark is a lasting cessation of violence, that might be possible to achieve with Hamas. Are you going to get them to renounce violence under any circumstances? No. They have an interpretation of this that is actually closer to the view of most Palestinians and most people in the Arab world than to the American or Israeli interpretation, which is that the overwhelming majority of the violence that goes on daily is the violence of the occupation, …until that stops there’s going to be resistance. Now, I don’t think Americans are going to accept that, but it’s really up to Israelis, …go back to war to the death with Hamas and the Palestinians, or whether establishing a long-lasting truce, which would be much more stable than anything we’ve seen to date, is a worthwhile objective. Now, the Israelis want to be able to maintain their occupation and have the Palestinians abjure any form of violence. … it means you can do anything you want as the most powerful party, and that what you do is not bad and that anything they do is unacceptable. …if you get another Fatah that agrees to do something, which Palestinian popular sentiment doesn’t fully accept as long as the occupation continues, it won’t last. If you tame Hamas, there will be something else that will come up and which will represent the fact that occupation will breed resistance, … . … it’s a hard call for the Israelis. They thought that they had gotten from the PLO … a renunciation of violence without the quid pro quo that Palestinian popular sentiment demands, … renunciation of the occupation. … that’s your first stumbling block, before you get to … recognition, before you get to the issue of a two-state solution. And that’s… the most important thing for Israelis, if they can get a real truce. … something we don’t even have right now. Whatever this is, it’s unsatisfactory in many respects. You have a dozen Palestinians dying a week, some … bystanders, but there’s a war going on inside the occupied territories between the Israeli security service … and the Palestinian population and various militant groups. Mainly now it’s Islamic Jihad and Fatah … being targeted. Q: Do you have any sense that if the Kadima party dominates in the election, … ] Ehud Olmert would be amenable to some kind of understanding with Hamas? A: My very hesitant response would be a lot will depend on who the second and third parties are in a Kadima coalition, … . And that in turn will depend a lot on what may happen between now and the end of March [when Israel holds its elections]. There seem to be people in the Israeli security services who are pushing the Palestinians as hard as they can to get a reaction. If they do get that reaction … I’m not sure we can predict what the effect of that on the Israeli voter will be. … Those people I know who are experts in Israeli politics have pointed out that coalitions put together in the way that [Ariel] Sharon put this together before his stroke have not had a great history after their first election. So a lot will depend on that. I think his instincts are similar to Sharon’s instincts, which is to not negotiate with the Palestinians,… which is to impose a unilateral solution, and in my view, therefore, to prolong the conflict. But Olmert has shown his ability to think outside the box. He may go beyond the limits of Sharon’s thinking. . . . … if there’s not a reformed Fatah, I would say Abbas is going to have serious problems. …if he continues to be treated as he has been treated by almost everybody in the world community, there’s no way that he can have any impact. … . And I’m not just criticizing the Bush administration … ; I’m criticizing a number of other actors, including the Israelis, but also including the Europeans and others. If you want this thing to succeed, you have to treat it as if it is worthwhile supporting. And that means saying to the Israelis, “You have to negotiate.” That means saying to the Israelis, “You cannot do things unilaterally.” …this is extremely unlikely to happen. So my expectation is that he’s going to continue to decline … . Q: Should Fatah change its mind and join a government? A: …. If I were Fatah, I would be focusing on reorganizing …Fatah is not going to exist for much longer as a major force if it doesn’t do that, whether it joins the government or not. … it is urgent to have the entire old guard drummed out of Fatah. I assume they will keep Abbas as a figurehead, but if Fatah has not fully renewed, it’s worthless, it’s good for nothing, it will have no impact on Palestinian politics in the near future, nor will it deserve to.

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