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Hamas,
Hezbollah and
Al Quada tempt fate, court regional instability, and threaten world commerce. They do not seem to be advocating an agenda (except perhaps for the annihilation of
Israel and the type of "westernization" exemplified by the
United States). They have no positive offering, very little to actually lose (they have nothing to protect except for the possible ability to destroy civility) and an agenda based on the international equivalent of radical and contagious negative campaigning. They nourish themselves on chaos.
And since they have nothing to lose (except the 'hero' status afforded their leaders), they cannot truly be a party to any productive negotiations.
These acknowledged
terrorist organizations, nestled in many nations, are more vociferous, and possibly more powerful and influential than the 'host' nations which harbor them and empower them. This configuration of terrorist rule makes any binding, stabilizing compromise an impossibility. Israel is not dealing with nations -- they are dealing with self-appointed
negotiators with
zero-sum game agendas.
*It is a cardinal rule of commerce to ultimately negotiate with figures of authority who can bind their organizations to an agreement. Without this, negotiations are futile. The Internationalist Page Blog does not view Israel as intractable; it views Israel as being coerced from multiple directions to negotiate with terrorists instead of sovereign leaders. Sadly, the leaders of the states in the troubled region are leaders in name only. These countries have become breeding grounds, hiding places and shields for the terrorist groups which actually control them.
The following article appeared in the New York Times:
November 19, 2012
Hamas Leader Dares Israel to Invade Amid Gaza Airstrikes
GAZA CITY — The top leader of Hamas dared Israel on Monday to launch a ground invasion of Gaza
and dismissed diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire in the
six-day-old conflict, as the Israeli military conducted a new wave of
deadly airstrikes on the besieged Palestinian
enclave, including a second hit on a 15-story building that houses
media outlets. A volley of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel
included one that hit a vacant school.
Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were under way, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal,
suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with
Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel.
“If
you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,” Mr. Meshal told
reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt
to “dictate its own terms and force us into silence.”
Rejecting
Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict, Mr.
Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis.
“The demand of the people of
Gaza is meeting their legimitate demands — for Israel to be restrained
from its aggression, assassinations and invasions, and for the siege
over Gaza to be ended,” he said.
The
Hamas Health Ministry said Monday evening that a total of 107 people
had been killed since Wednesday morning, when Israeli airstrikes began,
following months of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. A spokeswoman
for the Israeli military said she believed that a majority of these were
militants, though it is difficult to know because Hamas’s own fighting
brigade and the other factional groups are secretive.
The
Hamas ministry said that the dead included at least 26 children, 10
women and 12 men over 50, who were presumably not involved in combat. Of
the remainder, at least 36 are known militants. Hamas officials said
more than 860 have been wounded, 260 of them children, 140 of them women
and 55 men over 50.
Three
people have been killed so far in Israel, all civilians, in a rocket
strike that hit an apartment house in the southern Israeli town of
Kiryat Malachi on Thursday morning. The Israelis have said that at least
79 Israelis have been wounded and that Gaza rockets have reached as far
north as Tel Aviv.
The
latest Gaza casualties — 22 people reported killed since midnight local
time — included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes, a drone attack
on two men on a motorcycle, and a father and two toddler sons in their
bombed northern Gaza home, witnesses and medical sources said. Another
Israeli drone attack killed the driver of a taxi hired by journalists
and displaying “Press” signs, although it was not clear which
journalists had hired it, Palestinian officials said.
On
Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local
broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli
officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces
again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local
broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al
Arabiya, had offices.
That
attack, which struck a computer shop on the third floor, sparked a
blaze that sent plumes of dark smoke creeping up the sides of the
building. Video footage showed clouds of smoke billowing.
An
Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here on Sunday,
killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single
family, in the deadliest single strike since the latest conflict began.
Members of the family were buried Monday in a rite that turned into a
gesture of defiance and became a rally supporting Gaza’s militant Hamas
rulers.
A
militant leader said Tel Aviv, in the Israeli heartland, would be hit
“over and over” and warned Israelis that their leaders were misleading
them and would “take them to hell.”
Israel
says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas from launching the
rockets, but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled
toward targets in Israel, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome
defense system. Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli
city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted but one smashed through the
concrete roof at the entrance to an empty school. There were no reports
of casualties. Other rockets rained on areas along the border with Gaza.
Later
a second salvo struck Ashkelon. Several rockets were intercepted, but
one crashed down onto a house, causing damage but no casualties.
Israeli
officials said 135 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on Monday, of
which 42 were intercepted by Iron Dome, Most of the others landed in
open areas.
On
Sunday, a new volley of Palestinian rockets totaled nearly 100 by
nightfall, including two that soared toward Tel Aviv but were knocked
out of the sky by Israeli defenses.
In
a statement on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces said overnight targets
included “underground rocket launchers, terror tunnels, training bases, Hamas
command posts and weapon storage facilities.” But news reports said the
strikes flattened two houses belonging to a single family, killing two
children and two adults and injuring 42 people, while a shrapnel burst
from another attack killed one child and wounded others living near the
rubble of the former national security compound.
The
latest exchanges offered a grim backdrop to Egyptian-led cease-fire
efforts that have so far proved inconclusive. The United Nations
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, was set to join the effort in Cairo.
Brig.
Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said
there had been a reduction of up to 40 percent in rocket fire from Gaza,
while Israeli forces had launched 40 attacks on tunnels between Egypt
and Gaza, both at the entrances and along the road leading to them,
causing considerable damage.
He
said six rocket launching teams and two men on motorcycles were hit,
while the Israeli forces continued to intercept Palestinian radio
signals to urge Gaza residents to steer clear of activists.
In
the Israeli strike on Sunday morning, it took emergency workers and a
Caterpillar digger more than an hour to reveal the extent of the
devastation under the two-story home of Jamal Dalu, a shop owner. Mr.
Dalu was at the market when the blast wiped out nearly his entire
family: His sister, wife, two daughters, daughter-in-law and four
grandchildren ages 2 to 6 all perished under the rubble, along with two
neighbors, an 18-year-old and his grandmother.
Ismail
Haniya, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction that rules
Gaza, condemned the attack as a “massacre” that “exceeded all
expectations.”
General Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israeli military, said it was “examining the event.”
“The
wanted target in this case was responsible for firing dozens of rockets
into Israel,” he added. “I do not know what happened to him, but I do
know that we are committed to the safety of the citizens of Israel.”
The
Dalu family were buried Monday after an intense, chaotic two-hour
funeral procession that quickly became a Hamas rally clearly aimed at
least in part at sending a strong message of defiance through the scores
of journalists in the crowd. Thousands thronged the streets following
the bodies from the destroyed Dalu home to the Esraa Mosque and then to
the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, shouting slogans of resistance as fighters
fired rifles into the air and waved the green Hamas flags as well as the
white ones of the armed Al Qassam Brigades.
Outside the cemetery, a Qassam leader named Mosheer Al Masri spoke not about the victims but about the enemy.
“Tel
Aviv, which we hit, will be hit over and over until you stop your
crimes against our civilians,” Mr. Masri said. “Your threats will not
scare us, they will just make us stronger and more resistant.”
He
threatened a repeat of the 2006 kidnapping of Sgt. Gilad Shalit if
Israel proceeded with a ground invasion, and vowed “revenge for the
killing of these children.” He offered a message to Israelis: “Your
leaders are misleading you and will take you to hell.”
“Our
message to Netanyahu is that we will defeat you like we defeated your
ancestors,” he added. “We still have so much in our pockets and we will
show you if we have to.”
Fares
Akram and Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City, and Alan Cowell from
London. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Ashkelon,
Israel; Ethan Bronner, Myra Noveck and Irit Pazner Garshowitz from
Jerusalem; Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Israel; Peter Baker from
Bangkok; and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.
The lessons here are simple ones, but are worth mentioning:
1) You can only negotiate with legitimately empowered and legitimate decision makers;
2) You cannot negotiate while you are actively in a state of militant conflict;
3) Without a demonstrated basis of mutual respect, trust and value to exchange, you can not have any negotiations;
4) You cannot engage in palliative discourse with any party who or which advocates your destruction, or wishes you to render yourself more vulnerable to attack;
5) In any negotiation, you must look at your counterpart's historical conduct in order to know which negotiating strategies are most likely to work, and which are most likely to b futile.
6) A negotiation takes place, of necessity, between two parties, and not through a "weighing in" of industry or world opinion. These latter distractions create further grandstanding and belligerence between the negotiating parities, Third parties can only serve to suggest a negotiation or to facilitate an initial introduction.
7) In any negotiation, sadly, the party with the most to lose is at a decided perceptual disadvantage.
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While I am an advocate of negotiation, mediation and arbitration (in that order), I don't think that any of these three tools are appropriate in the situation cited above, where rockets speak louder than words, and a positive, peaceful and stable outcome is not desired equally by both sides in sincerity.
Thank you, as always for reading me and for retweeting me.
Douglas E. Castle for
The Internationalist Page Blog,
The Global Futurist Blog,
The Business And Project Planning And Management Blog, The CrowdFunding Incubator and
The InfoSphere Business Alerts And Intelligence Blog.
