Bernard-Henri Levy: "Oh ! The Fools!" (On a Palestinian Munich)

"As France's Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier accompanied Neville Chamberlain to Munich and acquiesced to the agreement with Hitler, though, personally, he had no illusions as to Hitler's ultimate intentions. Returning to Paris, he glanced out the plane window at the cheering crowds and reportedly exclaimed, "Ah! Les cons! [Oh! The fools!]"

"Oh ! The Fools!" (On a Palestinian Munich)

How can anyone be so stupid?

And how can so many commentators, how can this or that eminence of whatever parliamentary commission, this or that minister or former minister, how can the French Socialist party--in short, how can so many reasonable minds welcome the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas as good news, a good sign, like the far too long delayed reunion of a too long divided people, when it is, in reality, a catastrophe?

It is a catastrophe for Israel, aware that an organisation whose favoured mode of diplomatic expression has consisted, since the 2007 putsch, of firing missiles at the civilians of Sderot, is back in the saddle. Barely a month ago, on Hamas's initiative, a schoolbus came under fire from a Kornet anti-tank weapon.

It is a catastrophe for Mahmud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who, in a few short moments, the time it took to sign at the bottom of the page of an accord he himself may not believe in, has ruined all the hard-won political and moral credit gained in the course of the years when, confronted by a Hamas dubbed a "terrorist organisation" by all whose voices are considered authoritative, beginning with the European Union and the United States, he hung on. Mahmud Abbas has returned to the bygone days of doublespeak, when Yasser Arafat declared the PLO charter "null and void", all the while underhandedly encouraging various and diverse terrorist attacks.

It is a catastrophe for the Palestinian people themselves

(but perhaps the great conciliators, these friends of the Palestinian people who know better than they themselves what is good for them, are not worried about that?)

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Bernard-Henri Levy is a French philosopher and writer. In France, he is one of the stars of the group called "the New Philosophers" [les nouveaux philosophes]. His condemnation of the Hamas-Fatah agreement is especially significant because Levy is one of the founders of a European group its founders called 'J Call' which is parallel to J Street. Here, Levy publicly comes out against the official JStreet position.

Hat tip: EG

Technorati Tag: Fatah and Hamas.