Howard Berman, chairman of House Foreign Affairs, has issued the following defiant statement about the fresh news of negotiations between Hamas and Fatah to form a unity government:
any Palestinian national unity government that fails unequivocally to
recognize Israel, to reject terrorism and all forms of violence, and to
accept all previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In addition, it
should be a government of unquestioned integrity, and fully committed
to fiscal responsibility and transparency.”
This is the voice of the Israel lobby; Berman got on to Foreign Affairs because of Israel, he told a Sherman Oaks, California, audience last year. (And Tom Hayden has said that Berman's brother the political operative Michael Berman once told him that "I represent the Israeli Defense Forces" in the U.S.) In his Sherman Oaks appearance, Berman said that the purpose of Congress was to act as a "brake" on the White House pursuing alternative policies in the Middle East–which is to say, when the White House demands that Israel end its expansion into the West Bank, Congress holds the line for rightwing Israeli governments.
This is the significance of Berman's statement: he is trying to stop the unification of the Palestinians, or impose conditions on this important process, when it could actually make a difference in the peace negotiations.
As Mustapha Tlili of the NYU Center for Dialogues told me earlier today, Gaza has deeply radicalized the Palestinian people. The Obama Administration recognizes this. The issue of equivocally or unequivocally recognizing Israel can always be finessed in negotiations (just as Israel's non-recognition of the Palestinians was finessed in 1977 under Jimmy Carter as he went forward with those negotiations). The central question, as even Andrew Sullivan is saying, is whether the U.S. will put pressure on Israel to pull out of the West Bank now. If not, we go back to the drawing board.
