In the Sydney Morning Herald, reporter Ed O’Loughlin attempts to draw a disingenuous moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas:
Since last week’s Palestinian elections Israel’s leading media commentators have been falling over themselves to denounce the Palestinians for electing a party that rejects the Oslo accords and the two-state solution.
They forget that Israelis did the same thing themselves in 1996, only months after the murder of the Nobel peace laureate Yitzhak Rabin, when arch hawk and Oslo rejectionist Benjamin Netanyahu displaced peacenik Shimon Peres in a free and fair election.
In recent days Hamas’s violent, mystical and anti-Semitic founding charter has been widely cited in Israel as proof that it will never be prepared to moderate or negotiate, whatever its leaders may now be saying.
Yet Ariel Sharon – Israel’s longtime uber-hawk (in these parts one quickly runs out of hawk-like superlatives) – originally became prime minister on the back of a long history of alleged war crimes. His Likud party’s platform “flatly rejected” Oslo’s two-state solution and any halt to continuing Jewish settlement of land seized from Palestinians.
What O’Loughlin doesn’t acknowledge is that the Labor and Likud parties are committed to democracy, honor the agreements of their predecessors and don’t maintain “armed wings.”
