In other news from Happyland, the number-two of Hamas, Moussa Abu Marzook, gave an interview to the Forward in which he -- and this will be very surprising to people who aren't paying attention, and to Peter Beinart -- rules out recognizing Israel, and says that the most Hamas could offer Israel is a long-term truce. "We will not recognize Israel as a state. It will be like the relationship between Lebanon and Israel or Syria and Israel."
And those are excellent relationships!
I mention Peter because he has argued for quite a while that Hamas is actually moderating, and that we should not pay too much attention to the group's charter (which calls for, you know, killing a lot of Israelis and destroying their country). One of the irksome qualities of Peter's benign interpretation of Hamas is that he doesn't extend the same benefit of the doubt to another group of bearded fundamentalists, the Jewish settlers. For Peter, settler ideology is deadly and should be treated as such; Hamas, on the other hand, is just waiting for the right moment to emerge as a moderate, non-anti-Semitic force. I think it's better to take all religious fundamentalists at their word, which is why I worry incessantly about the willingness of some settlers to bring about the apocalypse, as I wrote here.
Two liberals fight each other and both dump on the Jews.
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