Sunday, September 28, 2014

When I first glanced at the headline on today's Jerusalem Online and reports in the Jerusalem Post and other Israeli newspapers, I thought they must have been a satire: "Washington officials have told Egypt that the US will guarantee Israel's commitment to any agreement signed." But it was not a satire. This was deadly serious, confirmed by other Israeli newspapers and sources in Cairo.
The US offering to Hamas to "guarantee" Israeli commitments to any agreement signed? As if anyone needed proof of the Obama administration's antipathy to Israel, here it was in black and white. If any party needed a commitment to enforce its agreements in any deal, it would have been Hamas, which has been known to break every commitment it ever made. To pick just a few at random:
Hamas recently violated 9 cease fire agreements, including two of its own.
Hamas illegally siphoned thousands of tons of cement and steel shipments it received from international donors and Israel that it had committed to use to build the civilian infrastructure in Gaza for hospitals, schools and apartment buildings; instead it spent upwards of $500 million of these humanitarian shipments to covertly build numerous tunnels buried deep underground into Israel in order to carry out murderous raids on Israeli civilian communities intended to kill tens of thousands of Israelis.

 Hamas violated the terms of the 2012 ceasefire negotiated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton together with Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi. Under the terms of that agreement, Hamas committed to stop firing missiles into Israel from Gaza. But in fact, Hamas never honored its commitment and continued to fire hundreds of missiles from Gaza into southern Israel during the entire year of 2013 and the first half of 2014. But then in July, Hamas initiated a full scale war against Israel in which it launched 4,000 missiles into 80 percent of Israel's population centers.
Hamas violated the commitment to the Palestinian Authority that it would never launch a coup d'état against the PA after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. But in 2007, Hamas did exactly that in a bloody takeover of Gaza, kicking out and killing PA officials.

 Hamas violated a solemn commitment to its own civilians that it would uphold the rule of law (yea, right) when it took over Gaza only to subsequently execute hundreds of dissident Gazans, torture and imprison thousands of political opponents, violently persecute the minority of Christians still living in Gaza and imprison and prosecute suspected gay Gazans.
It violated a commitment it made in the Clinton-negotiated 2012 truce that it would cease its missile attacks on Israel.

 And at the same time, it should be noted that President Obama personally signed an official letter at the time of the 2012 negotiated ceasefire to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US would provide Israel with the technology to defeat and stop Hamas smuggling of weapons. But subsequent to that promise, Hamas soon received in massive quantities from Iran, Sudan, and North Korea. That promise was never carried out.

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