In the Israel/Hamas War of 2014, Facts Were Smothered By Adding Fiction to the Fray!!

• Hamas denies Israel's right to exist.  But regardless of the circumstances of its birth, Israel does exist.  It is a member of the UN; it has peace treaties with both Egypt and Jordan; it is a party to the Oslo Agreements of 1993 in spite of their rejection by Mr. Netanyahu; and it is in negotiations, now stalled, with the Palestinian Authority which is legally the representative of the Palestinian people.
• Israel, as per Mr. Netanyahu, demands of Hamas a quid pro quo.  It calls for "quiet for quiet."  Unworkable.  Since 2007, Israel has besieged Gaza with a ring of steel.  You cannot hold a person's head in a choke hold, cutting off his breathing, then demand of him to stop struggling.  Israel claims that the siege is needed for its own security.  Israel is entitled to its security within its own borders which include neither Gaza nor the West Bank.  History has shown that Israeli security lies solely, not within the framework of its armed might (the 5th biggest army in the world), but in the framework of peace treaties.  The Palestinians have been waiting for one since 1993.  Postponing such contractual arrangement is a postponement of security.
• Since 2006, Hamas has been in rebellion against the Palestinian Authority.  But that authority, though enfeebled by corruption and aimlessness, has been recognized by the UN as an observer State.  Hamas has taken over Gaza by brutal force.  Hamas has opportuned the wave of Palestinian disgust at the corruption of the PLO.  But Hamas is neither a Palestinian government in exile, nor is it a representative of all Gazans, let alone all Palestinians.  And, as it calls itself the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat Al-Muqawmah Al-Islamiah), where does this leave the Palestinian Christians who, together with the Syrian and Lebanese Christians, were the founding fathers of Arab nationalism?!
• Israel threatens the Gazans with a return to an Israeli military occupation.  It claims that Sharon's evacuation of that territory has resulted in handing the territory over to Hamas.  But reoccupation of Gaza by Israeli troops is a sure recipe for continuous bloodshed on both sides.  As compared to the West Bank, Gaza is guerrilla warfare territory par excellence.  Its demographic density is its guerrilla "weapon of mass destruction."  Like in the case of Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, because of the non-defeat of Hezbollah, Sharon, in a wise attempt to save Israeli lives, ordered withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.  It was a tactic of Israeli national expediency; not a gesture of Israeli abandonment of its practices of creeping annexation of Palestinian territories.
• Hamas, in the course of this Ramadan War II (the first was between Egypt and Israel in 1973), has rejected the Egyptian cease-fire initiative. Reason: Hamas was not consulted!!  How cynical!!  If Hamas is truly concerned with the rising cost in Palestinian blood (more than 1400 Palestinians have thus far perished), does it really matter that Cairo did not place a long distance telephone call to Hamas?  That rejection was a transparent search by Hamas for re-recognition by Cairo.  
• For reasons of Egyptian security and secularity, Cairo has declared the Muslim Brotherhood in December 2013 a terrorist organization.  Hamas, as an offshoot of the Brotherhood, thought it expedient to manifest solidarity with its parent organization.  Thus it illogically engaged in terrorist attacks on Egyptian army and police personnel, as well as tourists in Sinai.  A fatal mistake!!  Consequently, post-Brotherhood Egypt is now waging daily defensive actions against Hamas and its poisonous franchises.  It was incumbent upon Egypt, for purely national reasons, to label Hamas also a terror organization.  From the destruction of Hamas tunnels leading from Gaza into Sinai, to near total closure of the Rafah Crossing, Egypt's actions have already cost Hamas half a billion dollars in annual ill-gotten revenues.
• Israel, is reinterpreting those Egyptian defensive actions against Hamas, as "an Israeli/Egyptian siege" of Gaza.  No.  Egypt is not an Israeli ally in besieging Gaza.  Under the UN Anti-Genocide Convention, a siege is a secondary form of genocide.  Egypt is closing its Sinai borders to stanch the flow of murderous operatives into its territory.  Both Hamas and Israel, each for its own reasons, pretend that Egyptian sovereign acts within its borders are complementary to the hideous Israeli siege of Gaza.  Unlike Israel, Egypt is not blocking Gaza seaports and airports.  Nor is Egypt, for example, requiring the registration by Israel of every baby born in Gaza.
• Hamas, in its rejection of the Egyptian cease-fire proposals, demanded that those proposals should also include the re-opening of the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt at all times.  Hello!!  Can you read?  Egypt has already declared you "an enemy" and "a terrorist organization."  And when you are gasping for air, because of the war with Israel, you are in no position to dictate terms to Cairo.  The violation of Egyptian borders in Sinai by Hamas during the Morsi defunct regime was one of several reasons why the June 30 Egyptian Revolution threw out that pro-Hamas Islamist regime.  Through the Revolutions of January 25, 2011, and June 30, 2013, Egypt has turned secular, nationalistic, internally-bound, and abandoning the unworkable adventures of Arabism of the Nasser to Mubarak period. 
• Egypt has turned away from the hocus-pocus of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism.  The only "pan" in the Egypt of today is pan-Egyptianism which creates jobs and bestow dignity on the Copts, the Sinai Bedouins, the Nubians, the Shii minority, and the dwellers of the western desert along the Libyan explosive borders.  In summary, Egypt has turned inward, deeming intervention in its internal affairs from any quarters as a hostile infraction.  The Rafah Crossing is not a bridge.  It is a sovereign marker which may be opened by a sovereign Egyptian decision.  Egypt, because of the human catastrophe in Gaza, has decided on two types of openings: entry into Egypt by wounded Palestinians for treatment, and allowing a Hamas representative to be present in Cairo as a member of Abbas delegation for talks on the cease fire.  So please stop spinning!!
• Israel in an act of high-handedness, rejected dealing with the unity government declared by Abbas and Hamas in April 2014.  Its pretext was that no negotiations could be conducted with a government which includes a "terrorist component" meaning Hamas.  This is a legal, political, and diplomatic idiocy.  Though a sovereign State, Israel has no legal capacity to dictate to the Palestinians who should or should not be in their government.  The Netanyahu coalition includes crazies who demand annexation of all Palestinian territories.  Israel's rejection of dealing with the Palestinian unity government is, in effect, a continuation of the Israeli fiction that Israel has no credible negotiating partner.
• Had Netanyahu gotten off his high horse, he might have neutralized the Hamas idiocy of denying Israel's existence.  This Israeli rejectionist front deserves what the great Israeli statesman and Arabist scholar, Abba Eban, had once said about the Palestinians.  Turning his adage around, he might have said: "The Israelis never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity."  In effect, Israel's refusal to deal with the Palestinian national unity government constitutes another form of siege.
• Hamas, as a movement is hopelessly fractured.  In spite of the blatant obfuscation of its political boss, Khaled Mishaal, in his recent interview with Charlie Rose of CBS and Channel 13 (New York), it is the military wing, not the political wing, which is now calling the murderous shots.  Another Mishaal grand dissimulation during that interview was his response to Rose's question: "Why are you residing in Qatar, and not in Gaza?"  With the emphasis of a well-practised truth-avoider, Mishaal in effect said through an interpreter: "The Palestinians are everywhere in the diaspora." Then later said: "I cannot be admitted to Gaza."  Of course, Khalid, let your people die in Gaza, while you enjoy a privileged life made sweet by petro-wealth!!  Leading from behind is much safer!!
• Neither Qatar (the mouse that keeps on roaring), nor Turkey (with a Prime Minister who fancies himself the new Caliph) can compensate Hamas for its well-deserved loss of Egypt.  Ordogan's insults directed regularly at Israel, and Qatar's gold, channeled habitually to both Hamas and the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood, cannot replicate Egypt's strategic position bordering Gaza.  And neither Ordogan nor Hamas can bring back to Egypt the ousted Islamist governance.  Regardless of how often Ordogan raises the four fingers of "the Rabaa salute," Morsi's chances of resuming his Islamist rule in Egypt are as great as those of a snowball in the boiling hot desert. 
• As for Israel, none of its present practices in Palestinian territories outside of the green line, unless modified through successful negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, is bound to prevail.  Not its 47 years of military occupation.  Not its military superiority.  Not its inhumane siege of Gaza.  Not its creeping annexation through construction of settlements on lands acquired by force in 1967.  Not its strategic relations with America.  Not its coercive negotiations.  Not its pretense that its forces could legally stay on Palestinian territories following the attainment of a two-State solution.  Not its prowess in the global field of public relations.  Not in its contribution to the transformation of a territorial conflict into a religious-ethnic conflict.  Not even with Mr. Netanyahu's demand for "quiet for quiet," in effect an imperial call for "unconditional surrender."  
• None of these colonial practices, beliefs and utterances could survive as insuring, in the long run, Israel's security.  If no two-State solution can emerge through negotiations, with a fully sovereign State of Palestine, then both the Israelis and the Palestinians are destined to be victims of wars without end.
• Too bad that visionary leaders, like Sadat and Begin, are no more.  They dared to take a leap of faith by concluding a historic peace treaty in 1979.  When Sadat was assassinated by the Islamists in 1981 for that transformative act, Begin marched in his funeral.  But the PLO, under Arafat, marched in the opposite direction by intoning: "May God Bless the Hand that Pulled the Trigger!!"  Had the PLO been blessed by enlightened leadership, responding positively to Sadat's call to the Palestians to join him in reconciliation with Israel in 1978-1979, the Palestinian flag would by now be flying high over the State of Palestine.
• The Palestinian tragedy could be traced to the perennial lack of a unifying iconic leadership.  Throughout the history of the British mandate over Palestine (1920 to 1948), the Yishov (the Jewish community) in Palestine was building for itself state institutions.  At the same time, the tribalised Palestinian Arabs led in multiple directions by feudal landed clans like the Nashashibis and the Husseinis were busily feuding against one another for pre-eminence as "southern Syrians," even during some furtive armed uprisings against the British and Jewish immigration.  The Palestinians have never had either a Mandela for peace, nor a Ho Chi Minh for resistance.
• Another example of the march against history in the unending search for a two-State solution is Netanyahu's present calls for "a Marshal Plan for Gaza!"  Mr. Prime Minister, save your breath!!  When I wrote my Ph.D. thesis at New York University in the 1960s on decolonization, I realized that the colonized, such as the Gazans today under Israeli siege, would never exchange their freedom for butter.  They are not seeking your bread.  They are seeing their very being.
• Would the warlords of Hamas and Israel of today ever come together?  In this I have no doubt.  Their portraits shall forever hang side by side in history's Great Hall of Infamy.  Admission Free!!  There is no exit through adding fiction the the fray!!
• This is habitually the fate of crazy deadenders, ideological maximalists, and deranged theocratic psychopaths.  Their wounds are self-inflicted.  But the wounds which they inflict upon others remain as gaping holes igniting the next genocidal round.