Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

How do you make a hero of someone you hate? Well, if you’re Israel you do pretty much all the things they’ve been doing unsuccessfully to extirpate Hamas and the terrorist threat from Gaza. Haaretz reports a Palestinian poll of West Bank and Gaza residents that finds that the popularity of Ismail Haniya and Hamas has risen dramatically since Israel attacked Gaza several weeks ago and killed 130 Palestinians:

Israel Defense Forces attacks in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip have boosted the popularity of the Islamist group’s leader Ismail Haniyeh among Palestinians in that territory and in the West Bank, according to a poll released Monday.

The survey by the West Bank-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that if new presidential elections were held, Haniyeh would receive 47 percent of the vote compared with 46 percent for President Mahmoud Abbas of the rival Fatah faction. The figures represented a sharp strengthening of Haniyeh’s popularity. He served as prime minister in the Hamas-led government Abbas dismissed after Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah in June.

But the survey also found that Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned in Israel and seen as a possible Abbas successor, would defeat Haniyeh by a clear margin. The poll gave him 57 percent of the vote, compared to Haniyeh’s 38 percent.

The center’s previous poll, in December, gave Gaza-based Haniyeh just 37 percent of a potential presidential vote compared with 56 percent for Abbas, whose peace efforts with Israel are opposed by Hamas.

The survey also noted that overall support for Fatah had declined and support for Hamas had risen slightly during this period:

The survey found that if new parliamentary elections were to take place, Hamas would receive 35 percent of the vote and Fatah 42 percent, compared to 46 percent for Fatah and 34 percent for Hamas in an opinion poll in January.

So there you have it. Instead of pre-empting Hamas or persuading Palestinians that Hamas has nothing to offer it, Israeli policy has done just the opposite. And it has done this not just in Gaza, which one might expect as it is a Hamas stronghold, but in the West Bank as well. If Israel keeps it up and continues to radicalize the population, Hamas will not only control the West Bank along with Gaza, we might eventually have Hezbollah or even Al Qaeda ruling the roost there. Then Israel will look back nostalgically on the days when they actually might have had an opportunity to negotiate with a responsible party (at least compared with Al Qaeda or Hezbollah) like Hamas. Do I hear “Iraq” anyone and the failed U.S. policy against insurgents there?