Hamas Plays a Zero-Sum Game : West Bank tragedy damages the peace process, as militants intended

Late Friday the people who run the militant Muslim organization Hamas announced they would give the Israeli soldier they kidnaped last Sunday one more day of life.

Perhaps it had occurred to Nachshon Waxman’s captors that it would be bad public relations to kill the 19-year-old corporal on the Jewish Sabbath. Perhaps they feared it would look like cheap upstaging if they murdered Waxman on the same day that Yasser Arafat, who heads the interim authority that is trying to create a Palestinian entity in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, was announced as a co-winner of what clearly was a premature Nobel Peace Prize. No matter. Whatever Hamas’ intentions, Waxman’s life was snuffed out anyway, as Israeli troops stormed the house on the West Bank where he was being held. Besides Waxman another soldier died, along with three Hamas kidnapers.

And so even as the peace process goes forward, the war between Israelis and Palestinians goes on. The difference now, of course, is that on the Palestinian side that war is being waged both in defiance of the internationally recognized Palestinian political leadership and with no thought of eventual political compromise. Hamas is playing a zero-sum game. Its goal is not peaceful coexistence, not a modus vivendi, but Israel’s elimination. And it seems quite ready to bring down all Palestinian hopes for a normal, self-governing existence in zealous pursuit of an objective that is wholly unreal and wholly unrealizable.

In the days immediately following Waxman’s kidnaping both Israel and the United States expressed deep frustration over Arafat’s apparent inability to control Hamas or to find Waxman. The discovery that Waxman was being held not in the Gaza Strip but on the West Bank, in an area still under Israeli control, somewhat helps the PLO chairman’s standing with Jerusalem and Washington.

But this whole tragic episode still represents a setback to the peace process, as Hamas intended. Arafat’s authority, and Palestinian peace hopes, are now on the line. The Palestinians can have progress toward self-rule or they can have Hamas running wild. There’s no way they can have both.