HOWARD EPSTEIN: MOLOTOV, RIBBENTROP AND A COCKTAIL FOR GAZA
Fatah and Hamas, in an historic agreement (another one) decided last week to pursue their common, stated aim — the destruction of Israel down to very last Jewish babe-in-arms — the more effectively in future, by burying the hatchet between them. By way of confirmation, the preamble to their agreement states that its purpose is:-
“ending the Occupation, establishing a sovereign Palestinian state on all of the lands occupied in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital, and the return of refugees.”
The alleged full terms of the agreement were allegedly leaked on Facebook — that respected and authoritative news-source — yesterday:
http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Leaked-the-six-clauses-of-the-Fatah-Hamas-rapprochement-deal-507401
as follows:-
- The Palestinian Authority government will be empowered to carry out fully its responsibilities in administrating the Gaza Strip as it does in the West Bank by December
- A PA-formed committee will resolve the employees issue by February 1.
- Border crossings in Gaza with Israel and Egypt will be transferred to the PA by November 1.
- PA security leaders will go to Gaza to discuss ways and mechanisms to rebuild the security services with relevant parties. According to Ahmad, the two parties agreed that the US-trained PA Presidential Guard will control the Egyptian-Gazan border.
- A meeting in Cairo will take place in the first week of December to evaluate the implementation of what was agreed between Hamas and Fatah.
- All the Palestinian factions that signed the Cairo reconciliation agreement in 2011, will meet on November 14 in the Egyptian capital to discuss the 2011 agreement.
Why the need for the agreement? In 2007, Fatah was ejected by Hamas from Gaza. “Unceremoniously” would be a polite term. Considering the fraternal ties between the members of Arafat’s Fatah and those of Hamas, the defenestration of young men (apparently without checking on that occasion whether they were homosexuals, the usual reason for the ejection of Arabs from high buildings by Arabs) of the terrorists of the former by the terrorists of the latter, not to mention their widespread machine-gunning — none of which stimulated a single street demonstration in London — was as bloody and accurate a display of the moral composition of Hamas as you are likely to get.
There was an earlier “historic peace agreement” between them in 2014 but its shelf life turned out to be no longer than that of a carton of milk. and there have been other attempts of varying frailty to heal the wounds. Generally, however, over the decade of estrangement, the theme has been the plotting by each for the removal of the other, as indecorously, if necessary, as Gaza was made “Fatahrein” in 2007.
Hamas’ designs on the West Bank have been thwarted in large part, for the direct benefit of Fatah, by Israel. Its forces have worked assiduously to maintain in power the preferable devil they know, Abu Mazen. He and his henchmen, in the meanwhile, have worked for the collapse of the Hamas administration, most recently by withholding payment for the supply of Israeli electricity to Gaza.
Note: Abu Mazen is the nom de guerre of octogenarian, Mahmoud Abbas, PhD in Holocaust Denial, now into the twelfth year of his four year term of office as PA president. We are still awaiting the announcement of his nom de paix. Here is a suggestion: عامل من أجل السلام مع إسرائيل which means Worker For Peace With Israel. (Don’t hold your breath.)
So, until last week, no love lost there. And yet this new agreement.
Brokered by Egypt (a country of knocking on for 100 million people with enough food at affordable prices for about half of them — but a large enough treasury to place orders for a vast array of Russian and American weaponry), the deal, as we see, is that Hamas will pass the administrative control of Gaza, including the key Rafah border crossing, to Fatah. That will be assumed by Abbas’s “presidential guard” on November 1 and, eventually, the complete administrative control of Gaza will pass to a “unity” government.
Plenty of time then for the deal to fall apart; but, even if it does not, you will have noticed the emphasis on administrative matters. Yet all these outfits, Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah — to pay more respect to the Iranian proxy to Israel’s north than it will ever deserve — have their non- administrative wings, or to give them their proper title: terrorist wings. On this matter, last week’s pact is silent.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu makes the point, reported in last Friday’s press, that unless Hamas hands over its military capability — which includes an underground system that puts to shame those serving London, New York and Moscow — to the apparently more acceptable Fatah, the deal is of no significance. Up to a point he is right; but beyond it the question is: what about the secret clauses?
Are we really expected to believe that in weeks of talks in Cairo, neither party asked the other: “Oh, and the guns. What do you propose about them?” You can bet next Friday’s chopped liver — or, if you are a modern Jew, a scrumptious kale and quinoa pie — that those guns and tunnels and rockets and the secret ammunition factories on the West Bank and the command and control centers in both places, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of destruction in which our neighbours’ leaderships prefer to invest rather than in the constructive activities in which Israel excels, are indeed fully covered. But secretly.
When enmity between murderous entities is resolved by a pact, you can be pretty sure there will be secret clauses. The Soviets and the Nazis — sworn enemies except for the period between 23 August 1939 and 22 June 1941 — signed a non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) on the earlier date, and with the Nazi invasion of Poland from the west a week later, the secret was out. The Russians waited a further fortnight to give effect to the totality of the Pact — the complete dismemberment of Poland and other states. (as for the later date, 22 June 1941 was when Hitler, in one of the most graphic acts of suicide in history, pushed his armies east, out of its already gobbled-up western half of Poland, to take the Soviet half and invade (in the Russian Orthodox view) the holy soil of Mother Russia — and thereby lay the ground-work for the destruction of the Heim, Yiddishkeit and six millions of our kith and kin).
The August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was an open, mutual commitment of non-belligerence by Germany and the USSR, and of mutual assistance in the event of an attack on either by a third party. So far so innocuous.
The secret clauses, however, set out in some detail how autonomous states that stood in the way of autocratic leaders (Hitler and Stalin) would have extinguished their independence and all forms of life that did not fit their opposing political but equally bloody models. Thus Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland became reduced to German and Soviet “spheres of influence” (although, in the event, Ukraine became the tragic substitute for Finland). The killing of over 14 million non-combatants in those lands, the “Bloodlands” of Timothy D Snyder’s detailed account of the waves of horror that repeatedly swept back and forth over them — and where the extermination camps for the Jews and others were built and operated — was the direct result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Doubtless, something along those lines is what Fatah and Hamas would have in store for Israel, given half a chance.
So, the fraternal bonds between Fatah and Hamas have been re-established and, by way of verification, we shall be treated this coming week to images from Gaza. That old arsonist in firefighters’ clothing, Mahmoud Abbas, will pay his first visit in years. Whether it will be to herald a peaceful reconciliation, a clandestine move towards a coordinated war on Israel or another damp squib in the time-honored tradition of these machinations, we shall see by and by. Constancy, except in hatred, has not been a noticeable trait in the DNA of the Palestinians’ competing leadership cabals.
The Finns, in their “Winter War” of 1939, successfully resisted the pernicious terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that applied to them; and, in an insulting reference to the Soviet foreign minister, named for him the Molotov Cocktail: a glass bottle containing a flammable substance, ignited by a burning cloth wick held in place by the bottle’s stopper. It has been a Palestinian weapon of choice in their stubborn avoidance of a negotiated settlement with Israel. The cocktail that Fatah have just had mixed for them by Egypt and Hamas in Gaza may be no less flammable and may, indeed, blow up in their faces.
In the meantime, what occurred in Gaza, when Hamas took control a decade ago by the wholesale murder of their own brothers, was a clear indication of what they have in mind for the Jews should they ever get close enough. (In the interim, they fire salvos of rockets indiscriminately whenever the mood takes them.)
It was not until 1989 that the existence of the Nazi-Soviet secret protocol was confirmed. This time around, the secret may be out in something more like fifty days after the disappearance from the scene of Abu Mazen. Israel can continue to protect him bodily from outward attack but, if he is unfortunate enough to go the way of most 82 year olds, we may not have long to wait for the full impact of the reconciliation agreement between Israel’s most local adversaries to be revealed.
© Howard Epstein – October 2017
The author’s book, Israel at Seventy: In Weizmann’s Image is available now from Amazon in paperback or as a Kindle e-book
As Israel reaches its seventieth birthday, it is timely to consider the story of its indispensable founder, Chaim Weizmann. Statesman and scientist, it was Weizmann who saved the British Empire from defeat in World War I, kindled the hope for the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, after an absence of 2,000 years, and was then instrumental in securing what was needed to establish the State of Israel and its future as a technological powerhouse. Weizmann may be said to be the world’s first 20th century – even 21st century – man. If any aspects of modern life became supremely important last century, and remain so in this, they are science & technology and networking. Weizmann’s chemistry, both in the laboratory and with a wide-range of key people, led to his four great political coups, each essential to the emergence of the State of Israel. In addition, he pulled off three crucial educational feats that secured Israel’s future and ensured its success – in his image. In the case of the political achievements, only Weizmann could have wrought them. In the case of the others, only he did. Despite these signature successes, today little is known of him and what he achieved. Why this should be so is revealed in a tale of rivalry between two political giants: Weizmann, the greater talent, but the older, and his nemesis, David Ben-Gurion.
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https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field- keywords=israel+at+70
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