The death of Border Police officer Barel Hadaria Shmueli at the hands of a Hamas terrorist on the Gaza border does not only reflect a tactical error made by the defense forces but a broader erroneous policy.
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Israel is looking to come to an arrangement with Hamas, not unlike the United States with Iran. And similarly to Washington, our government is also chasing a dream, at the core of which is the faulty understanding of Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestine Liberation Front.
In 1991, the Israeli government adopted an approach of diplomatic arrangement. The assumption – which turned out to be wrong – was that giving up Israeli territory to the Palestinians would placate their hostilities.
The catastrophic failure of the Oslo process following the Second Intifada – after Arafat rejected Israel's generous offer of a permanent agreement and backed the anti-Israel violence – showed that the Palestinian national movement never viewed its conflict with Israel in classical terms of political agreements based on territorial compromises, but as a long-term campaign to wipe Zionism off the face of the earth.
Almost 30 years later, Jerusalem insists on making the exact same error, only this time with regard to Hamas. Instead of a diplomatic agreement, this time it is an economic one, and instead of territory in return for peace, it is economy, funds, and partial lifting of "the Gaza siege" in return for security.
Such an outlook has become the cornerstone of Israeli policy in recent years. It boded well with the government's lack of desire to begin a military campaign in Gaza.
It has gotten so bad that lawmakers have begun blindly viewing terror acts committed by Hamas as "rebelliousness" that does not represent the organization's main goal.
Not even the recent 11-day war in Gaza changed the government's mind. On the contrary, it solidified the assumption that the fighting has created an opportunity for coming to an agreement, without realizing that just like Arafat and the PLO that never wanted to reach a compromise with Israel, neither does Hamas.
History teaches us that not only are Hamas and the PLO fundamentally the same but that diplomatic sacrifices by Israel will not guarantee peace for the Jewish state.
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