Stop Worrying and Start Living

This post is dedicated to Khalaf, Omar, and Khader. I have read all of their posts and comments and back and forth incendiary replies. I was originally planning to comment underneath Khalaf's post but then my post has gotten so large, therefore, I decided to make an entry out of it and this would be my first post in about a month and a half.

I think that it is too early to predict whether the newly elected Hamas government will succeed, fail , or remain as a lame-duck for the reminder of their 4-year term. Winning the office isn't an end by itself it is the beginning.

Some people get upset when someone criticizes Hamas for one reason or another, those people should know that dissent and constructive criticism are the highest form of patriotism.

Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas are immune from criticism, they stuck their head out there by accepting the positions that they have been privileged to be in, now they have to put up with what the rest of us have to say about them.

They are put in that position to serve and protect the Palestinian people, when the Palestinian people aren't being served or protected, then neither Hamas nor the Palestinian authority deserve any pats on the back.

Grant you Hamas is still going through its honey moon, but the honey moon is fast drawing to an end, and there is really no time for on the job training. Some people are saying that Hammas wasn't expecting to receive the stunning victory that it received and thus wasn't prepared to take full fledged responsibility from the get go, in my opinion this is a spurious excuse, if you aren't ready then why run in the first place.

Hammas says that it was counting on a national unity government, well, a national unity government is no where in sight, now what will Hamas do about it. There are salaries that need to be paid, garbage that needs to be hauled to the land fill, and bills for water and electricity that need to be paid.

Is Hamas ready to shoulder that kind of responsibility or is it going to continue griping about how the others are being critical of their governing structure and how they are tirelessly working on thwarting their schemes.

To put it more bluntly, does Hamas have a practical plan [ political as well as economic] to work with the situation as is ? If so then what is it ? Having said that they will only recognize Israel after the Israelis leave the West Bank and Gaza isn't a solution at all.

Israel will continue to act in a unilateral fashion as it please whenever and however the situation may accommodate its needs. Hamas in my opinion needs to put up or shut up.

Even if Jordan ,although I have no proof one way or another, drummed up the story about the weapon cache, so what! Even if Egypt refused to meet with Hamas's foreign minister, so what! it is all part of the job, and they must keep on going dealing with the problems as they come up.

I'm not necessarily pro Palestinian authority, pro Hamas, or pro the Jordanian regime, what I'm presenting here is an independent thought free from any prejudice or bias.

I think that Hamas has a lot of problems that need to be ironed out and I think that the Palestinian authority has a lot of problems as well, and unless they straighten out their act very quickly this dispute is going to become ugly and may even turn into full scale civil war, something that Israel has been yearning for for many years.

Let us hope that the cool heads would stop butting heads and start working for the best interest of their people without laying the blame on Jordan, the United States, and Israel, although these countries have a lot to be blamed for but what is the blaming going to do! It will aggravate the situation rather than mitigating it.

We need to help Hamas and help the Palestinian authority to get back on track to refocus their attention on the main issue of checkpoints, prisoners, border crossings and so on and so forth.

Bickering and tearing one another apart is going no where except the dead end. Both sides need to accept the outcome and live with the situation as it is depicted today.

Hamas won, fine, get over it now. The Palestinian authority personnel stole all that money, fine, get over it as well, no body is going to be prosecuted for whatever happened in the past, so the only course left is to move on and move on now before it is too late.