Hamas leader accuses West of hypocrisy

The new Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, has accused the US and Europe of hypocrisy in threatening to slash aid to the occupied territories unless Hamas meets western demands, while failing to hold Israel to a similar standard. Hamas leaders describe pressure to recognize Israel, respect accords and renounce violence as "cheap blackmail" aimed at corralling them into a "peace process" they describe as a trap. Haniya said that Israel had been allowed to repudiate peace accords and to lay the ground to unilaterally redraw its borders, without sanction from foreign powers. "They are not asking anything of Israel, that they recognize the 1967 borders or even the choice of the Palestinian people [in January's election]. They should be making the same demands of them that they make of us. There is a double standard," Haniya told the Guardian. The "Quartet" of peace mediators–Washington, Moscow, Brussels and the United Nations–laid down the conditions to be met by "all members of a future Palestinian government" shortly after Hamas's landslide election victory. But Haniya said Israel would fail to meet these requirements if they were applied to its dealings with the Palestinians. While the Quartet demands the Palestinian government publicly embraces the Oslo peace accords and the "roadmap" peace process, Hamas says Israel has been permitted to shun both. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister who has been in a coma for two months, called the Oslo accords "null and void." His administration attached 14 "reservations" to the roadmap and later declared the process "frozen" on the grounds that there was no partner for peace despite Palestinian pleas for negotiation. Israel used inaction on the roadmap to justify unilateral moves, including settlement expansion, as part of its plan to annex large parts of the West Bank. The Quartet said that neither side should take action that prejudges final status talks, but has not threatened sanctions against Israel. The Quartet wants each Palestinian cabinet minister to personally commit to recognition of Israel, when some members of Sharon's coalition governments campaigned against the creation of a Palestinian state and even advocated the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. The charter of Likud, the main ruling party until last autumn, effectively denies a Palestinian state by calling for "persistence in settling and developing all parts of the Land of Israel"–which includes the occupied territories–"and annexing them." "America sees with only one eye and hears with only one ear," said Salah Bardawil, Hamas's leader in the Palestinian parliament. "There was never any pressure on Israel when it ignored agreements. The PLO recognized Israel and what did it get for it? Now we are being asked to recognize Israel when it is annexing half of the West Bank behind the isolation wall." There is a deep wariness about engaging with a "peace process" that many Palestinians regard as a labyrinth in which they are forced to meet a series of tests while Israel expands its main West Bank colonies and lays the ground for a border deep inside the occupied territories. Last month the UN's Middle East peace envoy, Alvaro de Soto, recognized that there was widespread suspicion. "The sentiment that the pressure is heavily on the Palestinians, that the Israelis have been given an easy pass and allowed to do things that seriously alter the status quo and attempt to prejudge the final outcome, is, I would say, mainstream Palestinian," he said. He conceded that there had not been matching pressure by the Quartet on Israel. He pointed to the removal of an unauthorized West Bank Jewish outpost as evidence of concessions but acknowledged that Israel had removed only one of the more than 100 outposts. Western diplomats also acknowledge that Israel has not fulfilled a commitment to let convoys of Palestinian buses move between Gaza and the West Bank, and to keep the main goods crossing between Gaza and Israel open at all times.