Which is the Bigger Threat: Iran or Hamas?
Most pro-Israel activists agree: Hamas is a bad thing, Iranian nukes are a bad thing. For Israeli and American policy-makers, the tough question is: Which threat should take priority?
At the American Jewish Committee, it depends who you ask.
Yehudit Barsky, director of the organization’s New York-based Division on Middle East and International Terrorism, says that “the legitimization of Hamas is a process that must be avoided at all costs.”
But Eran Lerman, the director of AJC’s Jerusalem-based Israel/Middle East office, implies otherwise, when he argues that with the fight to keep up international pressure on Iran “ it becomes more necessary than ever to deal with the Palestinian conflicts – the Israeli-Palestinian and the Palestinian-Palestinian (Fatah vs. Hamas) – in ways that will not solve them, at least not anytime soon in both cases, but may contain them so that attention can be focused elsewhere.”
Barsky’s paper is the one getting the major play on the AJC’s home page (at least today).
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