MYTH

“Israel’s assassination attempt on a leader of Hamas was aimed at derailing the peace process laid out in the road map.”

FACT

In just the first week after accepting the road map, Israel began to implement 75 percent of its obligations called for in the plan’s first phase. Prime Minister Sharon made clear he was committed to implementing the agreement and matched his words with deeds by allowing Palestinian workers from the territories to enter Israel, withdrawing from cities in the Palestinian Authority where Palestinian security forces exert control, dismantling unauthorized outposts, releasing prisoners, lifting the general closure on the territories, and increasing the transfer of goods.

The most important obligation for the Palestinians in the first phase is to end violence, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, and disarm the militants. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas not only has made no effort to fulfill this prerequisite for peace, he explicitly said he would not take action against Hamas, which rejected the road map and said it would join with other Palestinian terrorist groups to continue their campaign to destroy Israel.²²

Hamas is the Palestinian equivalent of al-Qaida. Its covenant makes clear it will never accept the existence of a Jewish state in what it considers the Muslim heartland. The man Israel tried to kill, Abd al-Aziz Rantissi, is a senior leader of Hamas, someone who proudly claims “credit” for 72 suicide bombings that have killed 227 Israelis and wounded 1,393 just since September 2000.

Rather than ask why Israel attempted to kill an avowed terrorist, the pertinent question is: Why wasn’t Rantissi in jail? Yasser Arafat pledged in the Oslo agreements to fight terror and yet he failed to take any steps against Hamas. Abbas promised a renewed commitment to stop violence, but he has done no more than Arafat, and has unsuccessfully tried to coopt Hamas rather than dismantle it.

The United States understands that Israel’s fight against Hamas is part of the broader war on terror; after all, Hamas is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations and has called for attacks on Americans. While U.S. officials may be upset by the timing of Israel’s actions, they cannot object to the principle of targeting terrorist leaders, since they have pursued the same policy and, just a few months earlier, assassinated a group of al-Qaida operatives by firing a missile at their vehicle.

The road map offers a route to peace for Israel and the Palestinians, but Israel cannot be expected to give up its right to defend itself, and it certainly cannot stop its counterterror measures so long as the Palestinians fail to comply with their road map obligation to stop terror.

Source: Myths & Facts Online -- A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Mitchell G. Bard, http://www.JewishVirtualLibrary.org. To order a copy of the paperback edition of Myths and Facts, click HERE.

Dr. Bard is available for speaking engagements on this and other topics.

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