Israel, of all nations, should be aware of this deceptive tactic.

WHY do people keep trying to negotiate with terrorists?

Posted by: DJM at June 17, 2008 12:01 PM

What I haven't figured out is why Israel doesn't use this opportunity to really pound on Hamas? By signing this truce, Hamas is admitting to be in a weaker position. Now is the time to attack.

Posted by: tanstaafl at June 17, 2008 12:26 PM

A ceasefire would aim to end rocket and mortar bomb attacks on Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and Israeli raids in the territory.
.......................

More moral equivalence. That Israeli "raids" are only in response to attacks from Gaza are never mentioned, or that these attacks are not tit-for-tat reprisals, but always targetted attempts to take out combatants.
..............

Tanstaafl wrote:

What I haven't figured out is why Israel doesn't use this opportunity to really pound on Hamas? By signing this truce, Hamas is admitting to be in a weaker position. Now is the time to attack.
...............

Unfortunately, Israel is in a real no win situation here. Even if their leaders did fully realize the calculating nature of this "truce", they would look even worse in the biased eyes of the world if they were to refuse this "olive branch" from Hamas. Not only can Hamas break this truce any time they feel it is politic to do so, they can continue acts of terrorism against Israel--even lobbing rockets at her--simply by claiming that it is the work of free-lance terrorists that they cannot control. That no other country in the world would put up with this is not considered a mitigating factor.

Posted by: gravenimage at June 17, 2008 12:43 PM

The point to this hudna is for the Muslim side, now in a position of self-perceived weakness, to gather strength. The Infidel side, however, can benefit if, in agreeing -- I think foolishly -- to this hudna -- it makes clear several things.

The first thing is for the Infidel side -- in the case of this hudna the Israelis -- to make clear, to make public, to discuss openly, and to discuss not only in the press, and on radio, and on television, but also at every meeting with foreign leaders, at every appearance at every news conference in Israel and abroad, the nature of the "hudna" and its origins in the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya. This is part of the campaign to raise the consciousness of Infidels not only in Israel (god knows they need it), but everywhere in the Infidel world, for all the Infidels are, ultimately, not in different vessels but in the same boat.

The second thing for the Infidels -- in this particular case the Israelis --- to do is only to refrain from active war-making just as long as, but not one miniute longer, than the Arabs of Gaza. If they break that hudna, with a rocket fired Sderot-wards, that will be cause for rockets and planes to go into action, not against the particular Gazan Arabs who might have fired that rocket, but against all the war-making ability of those Gazan Arabs.

The third thing to do is to make clear that a "truce" or "hudna" does not mean that Israsel is under any obligation to supply oil, or electricity, or medicines, or food, for those who are unwilling to make peace, but are intent on using a hudna to prepare for war. Israel may enter into a "truce" but a truce with a mortal enemy is not the same thing as some kind of permanent social welfare program. The Gazan Arabs, like the Arabs in the Arab-occupied parts of Judea and Samaria (which were long ago allocated, by the League of Nations, to the one-- among the many mandates it set up to deal with the vast former Ottoman lands -- that was intended to be set aside for the Jewish National Home, the Jewish people. Don't worry too much about the Arabs. They've ended up with plenty -- 22 states, with a combined land area more than 1,000 times the size of hardly-possible-to-descry-on-a-world-map Israel, have been the beneficiaries of the most incredible, largest transfer of wealth in human history, and what's more, in every place where Muslim Arabs rule, they deny or attempt to deny autonomy, or even equal treatment, to every non-Muslim or non-Arab Muslim people under their control, from the black African Muslims in Darfur and black African Christians and animists in southern Sudan, to the Kurds in Iraq, the Berbers in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Maronites in Lebanon. No, don't worry about the Muslim Arabs, including the Gazan Arabs and those in the "West Bank" (as the government of Jordan ludicrously renamed the area).

Israelis, and indeed other Infidels, are not required to keep Gazan Arabs indefinitely on life-support. If Gaza is not economically viable, and it isn't, let the Gazan Arabs not be kept on a permanent international dole, while all around th world there are many peoples who could actually benefit from the aid misdirected, in such huge amounts, to those who for political reasons are not integrated into Arab societies when they could, far more easily than almost any other group of refugees -- see Elfan Rees on this -- in the post-war period, when hundreds of millions of people have been real, as opposed to tendentious, artificially-maintained-for-political-reasons, "refugees" -- the Arabs, renamed post-1967 as the "Palestinians" for the most obvious of propagandistic reasons.

The Gazan Arabs intend to use the hudna to their own purposes. But Israel can prevent those plans from succeeding, and can do so using its own propaganda, economic pressure, and so on. It need agree only to a cessation of certain kinds of military activity, a cessation contingent upon the Gazan Arabs doing the same. Only this need be agreed to, and nothing more.

Still, it was a foolish decision by a foolish government. And while Olmert is bad, foreign minister Livni, with that personal history ("my family are old Revisionists, but I see that that position isn't realistic, doesn't make sense" -- how wrong she is) she is so fond of retelling, is, while not corrupt, may in the end be nearly as naive, nearly as wilfully ignorant of Islam, nearly as unimaginative and uninspired, as dismal Olmert, now in his last dismal days.

Posted by: Hugh at June 17, 2008 12:51 PM

Whatever your blood enemies want DO THE OPPOSITE ALWAYS. Seems simple enough. We're not talking about a 'dispute over land' or some such thing we are talking about self-professed Islamic Nazis who have a sacred obligation to slaughter Jews.

Posted by: poetcomic1 at June 17, 2008 1:18 PM

What's the over/under on the first "industrial" accident to occur in Hamasland that is immediately blamed on the Israelis?

I'll go with Charles and say 6-8 hours.

Posted by: V.I.N.C.E.N.T. at June 17, 2008 1:31 PM

Getting words but no actions has never bothered Olmert (and many other Israeli leaders) before.

UN envoy: Israel has given Syria a 'huge gift' for free

A senior United Nations official has harshly criticized Israel's
indirect negotiations with Syria, whose second round ended yesterday, charging that "Israel has given Syria a huge gift, without thus far receiving anything in exchange."

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, made the comments last week in a conversation with Israeli diplomats.

and from the State Department
According to the report, Rice told Lebanese leaders during her unexpected visit to Beirut that the U.S. would bolster its efforts in the coming weeks toward pushing Israel to pull out from the Shaba Farms

Rice, in Beirut, voices U.S. backing for gov't that ups Hezbollah's power

so if this is correct then Olmert couldn't give a cigarette butt about Israelis, and nor does the US.

Posted by: Cynic at June 17, 2008 1:52 PM

What is the over/under in Vegas for Hamas breaking this "truce"?

One week?
Two weeks?

Posted by: give me doughnuts at June 17, 2008 2:23 PM

graven image - Israel image in the world press is already piss poor. Why worry?

Okay, Plan B. Move troops to the border. Lots of fly overs. Loud noises at night. Naval manuevers. Parachute in a mass quantity of bacon. Somebody is bound to crack.

Posted by: tanstaafl at June 17, 2008 2:40 PM

Israelis are not foolish. They know that truce is a truce, not a peace agreement.

If you can somehow persuade the next door bully to stop nagging, then you are better off. But this doesn't mean that the next door bully suddenly becomes your best friend. Far from it. The charter of Hamas is still the same.

I approve of this Israeli move, it will make life better for the Israelis living near Gaza. But yes, they should have in mind that hudna is a hudna.

Posted by: johnsawyer at June 17, 2008 5:04 PM

do we have a pool going on taking bets on the date,hour and minute when hostilities renew..as we know they will..

Posted by: pulsar182 at June 17, 2008 5:53 PM

another truce until the next suicide bomber makes a reservation in a restaurant and Hamas will deny knowing anything about it.

Posted by: Tartine at June 17, 2008 6:36 PM

Strange how the MSM like to use 'authentic' Muslim phrases such as 'honour killing' (as opposed to ultraviolent infanticide committed by sexually-insecure, mysoginistic sh*t-for-brains), but won't call a truce a Hudna (deceitful pause in hostilities to allow regrouping and build-up for further hostility).

(OK... i can see the reason for the first one - the true description is a bit longwinded)

Posted by: Un:dhimmi at June 17, 2008 6:55 PM

Since 2001 I have learned more Islamic phrases and customs than I ever wanted to...It is time the modern world put a stop to the insanity...

Posted by: chrisinsouthc at June 17, 2008 8:51 PM

Every day I read the Jerusalem Post online. Others here may read it and other Israeli media publications, online.

Not every day, but very often in the past year or so, in the talkbacks to articles that cry out for such illumination, I have inserted references to Bat Yeor, to dhimmitude, to the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, to hudna and darura. I was very pleased when I discovered I could fit all the salient points of a lapidary paragraph from 'Our Hugh', on the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, into the narrow compass of the 600 characters-including-spaces which are permitted in a JPost talkback. I have put these materials into Israeli English-language blogs, too. I have been advertising like mad for Mr Spencer, for Bat Yeor, and Mr Bostom. I have been quoting the Qur'an.

I have noticed, over the past year, an increasing number of similar comments, by readers Jewish and Gentile, who appear to have likewise done their homework.

We Infidels, we Kafir, are starting to understand what 'hudna' is, and why it is generally a snare and a delusion - unless, for its own reasons, the kafir side may be after a brief timeout too, and is under no illusions about what the other side is doing, to wit, rearming, since it itself is doing exactly the same at top speed (see 'O Jerusalem' for an account of just such a moment, just such a hudna, and the intelligent use that David Ben-Gurion made of it, during the Israeli War of Independence).

The passages from 'Reliance of the Traveller' that Mr Spencer has posted, above, in his commentary on this particular news story, should, from today, start appearing everywhere: Letters to the Editor, online newspaper talkbacks, and political blogs, not merely on the topic of the Hamas-Israel 'truce', but also on the topic of similar specious 'truce treaties' between Muslims and non-Muslims in places like the Philippines, India, Thailand, Sudan...

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at June 17, 2008 11:09 PM