Por Gerald Kaufman, labour MP for Manchester Gorton. (THE GUARDIAN, 28/01/06):
Lying in a coma in Hadassah hospital, Jerusalem, Ariel Sharon has achieved his final triumph. The Hamas victory in Wednesday's Palestinian elections is not only the inevitable outcome of everything Sharon did as prime minister, but is precisely what he would have wished.
Last week I argued in the House of Commons that "If Hamas does well [in the elections] as it may well do, the responsibility for that will lie with the Israeli government for nourishing the roots of Hamas. The sad thing is that Hamas and Likud and Kadima need each other. Israelis can say, 'We've got to do what we're doing because Hamas and Islamic Jihad are so dangerous'; Hamas and Islamic Jihad can say, 'We've got no alternative because the Israelis are oppressing us'." The Hamas landslide is the direct outcome of the utter frustration felt by Palestinians at the failure of anybody to do anything about the abject poverty and oppression under which they spend every day of their lives.
Neither the present Israeli government nor Hamas want a negotiated settlement bringing about a two-state solution. Hamas has been in a constant state of insurrection throughout its existence; and that suited Sharon perfectly. The current issue of the New Yorker contains a long article by the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, reporting on 20 hours of conversations he had with Sharon stretching over six years, right up to Sharon's stroke. Shavit traces the development of the Sharon policies which, as he puts it, "led to the transformation of a relatively modest and ascetic state [Israel] into an occupying bully".
He provides conclusive evidence that Sharon never wanted a settlement with the Palestinians. What he did was to take unilateral actions to reinforce Israel's dominance of the old British Palestinian mandated territory. When, not out of generosity or as part of a staged settlement, Sharon withdrew settlers from the Gaza strip and Shavit asked if the next step would be a major Israeli withdrawal on the West Bank, Sharon responded: "There isn't any possibility of doing this... There is only one unilateral move. There will not be another unilateral move."
Western politicians were gullible enough to believe that the Gaza withdrawal was a stage in the road map that would bring about a two-state solution. Palestinian voters, living in their hopeless predicament, knew better. Their vote for Hamas tells the world: "If we can't have our state, we will opt for armed resistance." When Yitzhak Rabin was defence minister and refused to negotiate with Yasser Arafat, I warned him: "If you don't talk to the PLO you'll be left with Hamas." Rabin learned. Sharon did not want to learn.
Nor does the Israeli policy that deliberately fostered support for Hamas end with Sharon. Ehud Olmert, who has succeeded Sharon as prime minister, is even more recalcitrant than Sharon, as I found when I interviewed him for a BBC film a little while ago. When he talks, as he has done since taking over from Sharon, about withdrawals on the West Bank, he does not do so foreshadowing productive negotiations with the Palestinians, but as part of a plan to make Israeli military deployments more secure. His immediate response to the election result was to assert that he would not negotiate with a Palestinian government that included Hamas.
The American neocons who surround President Bush swooped with grim glee at the Hamas victory. It suits their plans for the next stage for the region. Binyamin Netanyahu, extremist leader of Likud, stated his and the neocons' position with glib clarity: "Today Hamastan has been formed, a proxy of Iran in the image of the Taliban." The Israeli government has already warned of possible reaction if Iran proceeds with its nuclear programme: an act of especial hypocrisy, in view of the fact that Israel played a key role in supplying Iran with arms in Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra conspiracy - not to mention that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for nearly 40 years.
The consequences of the Iraq war are plain for all to see, as many of us warned before the war began. An American-Israeli war against Iran - even if on this occasion Britain resists being dragged into it - would be a catastrophe, not simply for the region but for the world. Regardless of the undeniably odious nature of Iran's government, it is a fact that Iran (unlike Iraq, Israel and, for that matter, the United States) has never waged an aggressive war against another country.
Our own government, in statements by Tony Blair and Jack Straw, has reacted sensibly. We must now use any influence we have with the White House to insist that the road map must be implemented. Bush's own reaction has so far been less bleak than might have been expected: "When you give people the vote, give them the chance to express themselves at the polls and they're unhappy with the status quo, they'll let you know."
We must build on that, and we must lose no time. Armageddon, after all, is a place in Israel.