Richard Engel Quotes
Hamas has long been Israel's enemy, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, the group is empowered like never before.
Engel, Richard. And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East. Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Hamas had, in a bloody armed coup, seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority, and refusing to negotiate with the Israelis undermined the Palestinian hopes of peace talks with Israel. The PA could no longer speak for the Palestinians. Hamas a particularly aggressive terrorist organization whose charter called for the death of all Jews in the world, wanted to force the Palestinian Authority to join them in terrorist attacks on Israel. The Palestinians had renounced terrorism and violence. The Hamas fighters were planning to fire rockets at Israel from the West Bank and launching other terrorist attacks against Israel, hoping that Israel would retaliate against the Palestinian Authority by attacking the West Bank which had not been destroyed at all while Gaza had lost much of its infrastructure and 2,000 lives. The Palestinian Authority was not about to let themselves get sucked into a war that they could not possible win and was contrary to the policies of Prime Minister Abbas and his elected government.
Clinton had been spending the greater part of his time trying to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This clause has been the cause of immense problems in the Mid-East. Hamas castigates any Palestinian who even suggests that there should be negotiations with Israel that are sincere as nothing less than the end of Israel is consistent with their charter. Anyone who uses the peace process for anything else but tactical advantage and buying time to strike again is a traitor. Meanwhile, the clause is taken be Israel to demonstrate that there is no point to any negotiations so long as the Palestinian Authority allows such an organization with this charter clause to be legal and operate in the open. The Palestinian Authority leadership are not willing to risk a civil war, and thus little or no progress is made.
The Arab League Members have historically been at each others throats with little concordance except hatred of Israel and Jews
At the time YaAlon was Rabin’s Chief of Intelligence.
Richard Engel is an American journalist and author who is NBC News' chief foreign correspondent. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008, after being the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief. Engel was the first broadcast journalist recipient of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his report "War Zone Diary".
