Hamas will not stop wanting to destroy Israel, and today's elections conclusively proved that the Palestinian population is overwhelmingly radicalized. Even if the Palestinian population wasn't radicalized, negotiating with the PLO as if they spoke for the Palestinian public is suicidal. The problem with the Oslo formulation (even in theory) has always fundamentally been its asymmetry: Israel must give up tangible land in return for intangible peace. This asymmetry, however, plays out in a very real way - giving up land makes it easier for the terrorists who 'haven't accepted peace yet' to murder Israelis. This tradeoff happens even in a 'successful' Oslo-type process: presuming that the PLO wanted peace, Israel was giving up land it made it easier for Hamas terrorists to slip into Israel and commit atrocities. And while that happened, Arafat insisted he didn't have control over those Hamas terrorists even though he was ostensibly in control of Gaza and the West Bank. But in a world where the government in control isn't even pretending to be committed to fighting terrorism, this psychological myopia is insane. Saying that Israel should negotiate with the PLO and not the Hamas-led Palestinian government is literally the advocacy that, even though Abbas can't deliver peace or security to Israel, Israel should negotiate with him - and should give up land and suffer suicide bombing. It's an Oslo replay to the extent that it pretends that the parties that Israel is negotiating with can deliver peace, but this time it's just lunacy: it literally calls on Israel to pretend that a person who doesn't have political or social control of the Palestinian public has both of those things. And yet this advocacy that is being heard from the White House (where Bush is urging Abbas to stay in power and negotiate with Israel) and from the West Bank (where Abbas is saying that Israel should negotiate directly with the PLO). Serious people are suggesting that Israel give up land and security to people who by definition can offer them nothing in return, even as people dedicated to destroying the state of Israel are legally in charge of all Palestinian territories. It is the surreal advocacy that Israel hand over land to Hamas, through Abbas.

Then there is the "Hamas will moderate" version. Note that this argument, even at its best, is ultimately still an Oslo delusion - even if Hamas moderates, it was not elected on a moderate platform (quite the opposite, in the last two weeks Hamas went out of its way to clear up any ideas that it might be moderating). This means that the vast majority of the Palestinian public swept into power a terrorist, "no negotiations ever" platform. And that means that if Hamas moderates, they'll lose the support they have now - which would at a minimum prevent them from swinging the Palestinian public towards peace. The Palestinian public is just too far gone.

Not that this 'what if Hamas moderates' debate matters - Hamas simply won't moderate. They announced immediately after the election that they're committed to liberating all Palestinian lands (even the usual journalists are only half-heartedly adding 'but they didn't define what they mean by Palestinian lands' - a particularly silly argument). Hamas's 'political' wing is as filled with terrorists as their 'terrorist' wing. We're not sure how many hundreds of times Hamas can declare their genocidal intentions while the Western media tries to find signs of moderation, but we're confident that we're going to find out.

Some people are arguing that Hamas is going to moderate - not because they want to, but because they'll have to when they're put in charge of day-to-day governing. But these are the same people arguing that Hamas was elected because of their networks of schools and hospitals, not pm account of their continued insistence on terrorism (they have to make that argument, otherwise they have to concede that the Palestinian public is too far gone to let any leader make peace with Israel). So now the argument is that putting Hamas in power and forcing them to pay attention to public utilities will force them to give up terrorism. But no one would deny that Hamas has successfully run their public service networks alongside their campaign of genocidal terrorism - if there was any tradeoff between the two, Hamas would have had to give up one or the other already. Hamas has always had more than enough people to simultaneously serve food in the West Bank and blow up cafes in Tel Aviv. They've proven that for decades, and pretending that the influx of money and legitimacy they just inherited will make their task harder is just incoherent.

Hamas may send out a single, dotty candidate to make sounds about New Age peace during the day, but at night they still dress up 2 year olds as suicide bombers. Hamas members are that far gone. Yet there are plenty of people willing to parse out already parsed statements in a desperate effort to find moderation (Hamas's "tone has changed as well"... oh well that's good).

The ultimate point is that there is overwhelming evidence that Hamas is not going to moderate - you have to discover potentially hidden intent in plainly clear statements or make historically falsified arguments about the intentions of terrorists. Anyone who is declaring that Hamas is going to moderate has to ignore a lot of evidence to the contrary. Anyone who is declaring that Hamas is unalterably committed to the destruction of Israel is just repeating what Hamas's leaders say. People are entitled to ignore evidence in the interest of wild, speculative claims. They shouldn't be entitled to undermine Israeli security on that basis. Israel has no negotiating partner. Anyone who argues otherwise has done a lot of work and twisted a lot of evidence to argue otherwise - their arguments are untenable and their motives for insisting upon them in the face of Hamas's statements and Middle East history should rightly be treated with suspicion.

[Cross-posted at Mere Rhetoric]