The Gaza Strip
Hamas won't go away
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
Palestine's Islamists can't be defeated or ignored, but embracing them won't be easy
EPA
AT FIRST it looked possible that the break-out by tens of thousands of Palestinians bottled up in the Gaza Strip would be a joyful but brief blip. Once Egypt had resealed the border, the inmates' misery would resume, along with the bloody stalemate that has prevailed since the Islamists of Hamas took control last June. But that has not happened. Instead, the balance of power has shifted—in Hamas's favour (see article).
Israel's policy of punishing the Gazans in the hope that they would get rid of Hamas, which they had elected two years ago, was not only morally wrong, but has also failed. Hamas has probably recouped its strength and increased its popularity. Moreover, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to foist responsibility for Gaza onto Egypt, in the hope that the Palestinians' fledgling two-part state would remain politically as well as territorially divided, with the bigger West Bank bit amiably engaged in the peace talks with Israel that were relaunched two months ago at Annapolis. In sum, Israel has failed to squeeze Hamas out of the equation—and will almost certainly, in the end, somehow have to accommodate it.
Easily said but very hard to do. On paper, Hamas's policy is both grotesque and delusional: the destruction of the Jewish state. But Hamas is also pragmatic. In the past few years, it has agreed to take part in a Palestinian political system that assumes co-operation with Israel. It joined a (short-lived) coalition government with its secular rivals, Fatah, the party of the late Yasser Arafat which has long dominated the Palestine Liberation Organisation and which recognised Israel 20 years ago. Several of Hamas's leaders have hinted that if a majority of Palestinians agreed to a two-state solution in a referendum, the Islamists would abide by the verdict. They still, however, insist, as Fatah does on paper, that all Palestinians have a right of return to their old homes in what is now Israel and that Israel's borders must be those that existed before the war of 1967. The hope among the majority of Palestinians and Israelis who want two states living in peace side by side is that, over time, Hamas will disavow its determination to destroy the Jewish state and enter talks on a lasting peace.
Since last June Hamas has been at war not just with Israel but with Fatah too. The representatives of both Fatah and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah man, have been chased out of Gaza or oppressed within the strip. Hamas has treated its Palestinian opponents brutally, as has Fatah in its own West Bank domain. Hamas's relations with Egypt are barely better: the Egyptian government on its own patch hates and fears the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Israel's agreement to start negotiating a peace treaty with Fatah, underwritten by the American administration at Annapolis, seemed to rest on an assumption that both sides would keep the incorrigibles of Hamas—and Gaza—out of any deal. That now seems much harder to achieve.
Try to domesticate it
But how to lure Hamas into peaceful politics? The first need is a ceasefire, which requires Hamas and other fighters to stop firing the rockets that rain down on Israelis living near Gaza (though it is worth noting that these rarely kill people—some 13 in seven years—whereas Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians as well as fighters in Gaza over the same period: at least 70, including 30-odd civilians, this January alone). The second is for Israel, Egypt and Fatah to accept Hamas as a partner in managing Gaza's borders. The third is for a wider prisoner exchange, to include an Israeli corporal held by Hamas for more than a year, along with the 40-plus Hamas members of parliament behind bars in the West Bank and some thousands of the 12,000-odd Palestinian militants in Israel's prisons. The fourth, and hardest to achieve, would be to get Hamas back into a Palestinian unity government under a clarified version of the deal made in Mecca a year ago.
The key requirement is that Hamas be judged by its deeds rather than its declaratory words. Some within Hamas think only of Israel's destruction; for more, it remains their long-term ambition. But opinion polls say that most Palestinians, including a good half of the 44% who voted for Hamas at the last election, accept a two-state solution. The way to bring Hamas on board is not to isolate it, which may make it stronger and more intransigent, but to entice it with measures of at least temporary respite that have a better chance, over time, of making it embrace the reality of a predominantly Jewish state next to a Palestinian one.
Hamas cannot expect a free pass to respectability. Its leaders cannot prevaricate over diplomacy for ever; ditching their anti-Semitic charter would help too. But insisting that Hamas recognises Israel outright before it can be deemed worthy of any kind of co-operation is pointless. It simply won't happen. Leaving an angry group of Islamists outside any deal that Israel makes with other Palestinians is bound, in the end, to undermine Israel's own long-term security. That is at least one lesson to come out of the Gaza fiasco.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/Pri...ry_id=10608398
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