You say potatoe, I say potato....

I was listening to a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Herat on C-SPAN this morning (because I'm a big nerd). As they often do, a caller decided to grace the world with her opinion, which, as they often do, caused me to start screaming at my radio. Which is just more evidence of my Irish temper. The reporter was talking about the fact that polls show Qadima leading Labor in tomorrows parliamentary election by ten mandates (kind of like seats in parliament) and that it looked like a foregone conclusion that Qadima would win pretty handily. The caller asked a question to the effect of, "If the party that you don't want to win ends up winning in the election, are you going to break off relations with them like you did with the Palestinians?" It was an obvious reference to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian election.

And that's when I kind of lost it.

Will someone please explain to me the moral equivalence between breaking off relations with a Hamas controlled Palestinian government and a Labor controlled Israeli government? The last time I checked, Hamas was advocating driving the Israelis into the sea, wiping them off the face of the Middle East, whereas Labor was advocating taking a more centrist approach to the Palestinians and conceding to them much more than their main adversary, Likud (in pre-Qadima days). Even if they WERE hard liners, they aren't an internationally recognized terrorist organization, which is why so many nations have told Hamas that they won't be invited to further negotiations until they give up the aspects of their position and charter that advocate non-state violence and violence against civilians!

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a Zionist. I'm a big proponent of the two state solution, and I really think that something LIKE the pre-1968 borders needs to be agreed upon. I also believe in Palestinian sovereignty and dignity, and I think we should continue to give aid to the Palestinian people through charities and agencies that don't go through their government (WHO, UNICEF, et cetera). And I think that the Hamas government should be engaged, lest we run the risk of having them disengage from the international political scene and become even more steadfast in their hard line position. But we're not engaging them in a meaningful way right now, and it's understandable why, given the fact that they are directly responsible for much of the non-state violence in Israel, they are an armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, et cetera.

But still, there's no comparison.