Now that thankfully most of the “drama” of Israel’s evacuation from Gaza of settlers (and of hundreds of extremist outside agitators) is winding down, it’s time to pay some serious attention to Palestinian politics. In particular, what are the hopes for finding a workable form of national unity inside Gaza once the IDF/IOF troops have finally left?
To a large degree, the answer for that lies with the Sharon government. Will it actually allow a robust Palestinian national administration to establish and exercise authority in the Strip after the disengagement? (See my last week’s column in the CSM for some thoughts on that.)
In addition to whatever longterm restrictions the Israelis may seek to retain on the Gazans’ ability to interact freely with the global economy, and to control their own borders and residency rights, in the short term there is also a real possibility that some in the Israeli security establishment may seek to puncture any Palestinian elation over the IDF/IOF withdrawal by launching one last massive, “didactic” strike against Gaza as they leave…
Let’s hope not.
(We can also expect that any such strike would only further consolidate Palestinian and Arab feeling around Hamas, which has always been far more doubting of the Sharon government’s bona fides than has Abu Mazen.)
But assuming the “best” re a relatively violence-free IDF/IOF withdrawal from here on, what can we expect regarding Palestinian politics?
Abu Mazen, as we know, has announced that the delayed elections to the Palestinian legislature will be held next January 21. Hamas has already said it will run in them. Abu Mazen– as I’ve written about on JWN a number of times in the past, and also here in Boston Review— has been much more realistic than Yasser Arafat ever was about the need to find a politically inclusive modus vivendi with Hamas, if the Palestinians are ever to have coherent national-level decisionmaking.
Also, as I noted in that BosRev piece, and in subsequent posts on JWN, inside Gaza, Hamas is certainly far better organized and more disciplined than the Palestinian secular nationalists. Many of the secular nationalists are known more these days for their profligacy, corruption, and intense internal jealousies than for any concrete service to their people.
(Abu Mazen is by and large– though perhaps not wholly– exempted from those kinds of criticisms.)
Hamas politburo president Khaled Mishal gave an important press conference in Beirut on Wednesday. It received sadly little attention in a US MSM that was absolutely drenched in the hyped-up “angst” of the settler-evacuations at the time. Luckily Israel’s HaAretz carried a fairly decent AP report of it:
- Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is an important achievement, but it will not lead to Hamas’ disarmament, the organization’s political leader, Khaled Meshal, said yesterday.
Meshal told reporters in a briefing that his group was still committed to a six-month-old truce with Israel, but added: “Our joy should not let us forget the march for liberation and the restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people.
“The withdrawal is a precedent and an important achievement because it is the first real withdrawal from Palestinian lands, but we are still at the beginning of the road, and we will not lay down arms,” Meshal continued.
The Hamas leader claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “wants to send a misleading message to the world, that he is a man of peace and must be rewarded for it,” charging that Sharon did not plan to remove Jewish settlers from all of Gaza.
“We will consider any part of the Strip that Israel keeps as a `Gazan Shaba Farms,” he said, referring to a disputed area on the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
The piece also noted that, “Meshal urged Arab countries not to hasten to normalize relations with Israel because of the withdrawal.”
Mishal has the distinction of having survived a very nasty and very personalized chemical-weapon attack that the Mossad launched against him in Amman, Jordan, in 1998.
Also quoted in that AP piece was Hamas’s spokesman in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar. The piece noted that Zahar had told the London-based Saudi daily Al-sharq Al-Awsat that, “Hamas planned to move its fight to the West Bank after Israel completed its pullout from Gaza.”
Meanwhile, I have found this interesting interview that Mishal gave (by phone) to al-Hayat’s talented bureau chief in Damascus, Ibrahim Homeidi, on Tuesday. In addition to reporting many of the comments cited above, Homeidi also reported the following (quick translation by HC here):
- Asked about Hamas’s competition with the Palestinian National Authority after the [Israeli] withdrawal, Mishal replied: “There is no-one who competes with the Authority for authority. We don’t seek [to exercise] authority in confrontation with the Authority, and no-one is above the law. But it is natural that no faction should be separated from Palestinian decisionmaking. We are comrades [shuraka’, = literally ‘co-participants’] in blood and comrades in decisionmaking. And decisionmaking is a national responsibility so large that no faction can be separated from it.” And Mishal stressed the necessity of, “reaching agreement on the conduct of the struggle against the enemy. The battle is still there even in the Strip because many things [regarding it] have not been defined yet.”
The Hamas political bureau head continued by saying that the movement [Hamas] “will shortly announce its agreement to participate in the [PNA] government” and that its concern about the elections is broader than “the concern about the delay”. He said, responding to a question, that the Movement “is committed to the decision for a ceasefire [ lit. a “calming”, tahdi’a] throughout the year 2005 but this ceasefire was [agreed to] on the basis of defined and reciprocal conditions including the ending of [Israeli acts of] aggression and the release of the prisoners.” He added: “If the enemy were to continue in its acts of aggression and its refusal to release the prisoners, then we would reconsider the calming. But from our side until this point we are committed to the calming.”
And has Hamas studied the [idea of] its leadership cadres being allowed to return to Gaza? Mishal replied: “Return is a legitimate right for every Palestinian. But the decision of the return of the leaderships and its timing is tied to the circumstances and developments of the coming stage, and events, and the leadership’s decision.”
To me, the most interesting thing there is Mishal’s announcement that Hamas will shortly be entering the PNA’s executive body. Recall that back in 1993-94, at the time when the Oslo Accords created this body called the “PA”, which would have some functions both to administer the areas of the WB&G from which Israel withdrew and would also be the body that negotiated the Palestinians’ broader, “final-status” claims against the Israelis, Hamas still adamantly opposed the whole process.
That was why, during the territories-wide elections of 1996 that voted Arafat in as PA “president” and also voted for a Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas as an organbization completely abstained from participation because of the depth of its opposition to the Oslo process.
Here we are, nine years down the line, and Hamas is not only, as we know, planning to compete vigorously in the scheduled PLC elections– but now, Mishal is signaling its readiness to enter–though notably not to take over– the P(N)A’s government.
I think Hamas’s inclusion in the Palestinian political system is a very, very constructive step. As is its participation in the ceasefire so far. Of course, for Hamas– as for the Palestinian secular nationists– there are many tough issues remaining regarding whether and how to seek to retain some form of “armed struggle” option at a time when the struggle for an independent national state is still extremely far from being over. (My own strong view, for what it is worth, is– with respect to the Palestinians as well as to the south Lebanese– that strong, community-wide grassroots organization, strong internal discipline, and very smart leadership can, in today’s world, be more reliably expected than any attempts at “armed struggle” to win the Arab peoples struggling against Israeli occupation a sustainable and independent national future.)
But anyway, this is clearly a political story whose unfolding over the months and years ahead promises to be really interesting. Maybe I should start planning my next trip to Gaza?
Three years ago, Prof. Efraim Inbar, Director of the Begin-Sadat Ceter for Strategic Studies, spoke on the UVa campus, and he was going on and on about the need for Israeli security as the justification for the continued occupation of territory on the other side of the Green Line. I told him Israel deserves to be secure, but then asked him given that Israel had made its peace with the various nations that had attacked it in the various wars since the creation of Israel, and had withdrawn from most of the territory taken from them, what was the security threat that justified the continued occupation of those specific territories?
Well, wouldn’t you know, he said that the Palestinians would destroy Israel if it withdrew, as evidenced by the PLO’s statement in 1967 that it wanted to destroy Israel and Hamas’ continuing avowal to do that. I had to say, I practically laughed out loud. I imagined the ferocious Palestinian military armed to the teeth lasting about 30 seconds in the face of the US-armed Israeli military. It really was a joke.
His statement, for me, belied the fact that Israel has no real justification, and it has not admitted to the only plausible reason for the continuing occupation, and that is for the execution of a land grab, across the Green Line. Long ago, the decision to settle was exactly the decision to grab land from the Palestinian mandate.
The reason I bting that story up is that it made me realize that Israel benefits from the terrorist attacks against it, because they provide cover in international news for its land-grab strategy. In that very real sense, Hamas is playing into the Israeli strategy. It would only be a matter of time before Palestinians began to realize this. So the only question for Hamas was the endgame.
Further highlighting this fact is the idea that a strategy truly designed only to provide for its own security, sans land grab, would entail splitting the Palestinian people. Israel could have chosen, if it did not chose to try to steal Palestinian land by getting its own settlers to commit war crimes (populating occupied territory), to instead have returned Palestinian territory sufficient to appease Palestinians wanting peace. Those Palestinians would then have been able to create a second state that was stable and strong enough to fight on its own the remaining (small, if you look at opinion polls these days) fraction of Palestinians who would still want to destroy Israel.
Upon realizing all of this, it became clear to me that Israel is in fact more than willing to pay the human price for the land grab, that that is part of its calculation.
But it also has an implication for Hamas, and we may be seeing signs of Hamas seeing and acting on them. Namely, Israel’s departure from Gaza in effect is its decision that Gaza is in fact not worth it, and that it wants other land instead, and its decision in that regard is opening the possibility of further changes. If Hamas remains only the people who still want to destroy Israel, their support could shrink to the small fraction I referred to in the face of those changes. So Hamas may be in part seeking to start playing out its endgame with the goal of being a major force in creating a strong Palestinian society, which has always been one of its goals.
Charles,
Indeed, Moshe Sneh and others, in July 1967, advocated turning over most of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians (many of whom at the time, particularly in Hebron, were petrified that Israel would take revenge for the ethnic cleansing of 1929). Unfortunately, it was Moshe Dayan’s view that won out.
I think that both you, and Inbar, do injustice to history by compressing and distorting the context. Yes, in 1967 there was reasonable cause to assume that an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza would present a significant security threat to Israel. Not because of an ineffective Palestinian army, as you speculate, but rather because it would become a staging area for an attack by Soviet supplied Arab states. There was no “land grab” involved here, but rather a rational – at the time – security argument.
The subsequent Gush Emunim movement did use this security argument in support of its settlement agenda. I think that there might even have been a case up to the fall of the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the reality of large numbers of ballistic missiles on the other. There has been a shift in the security equation, and I think that that may have been one of the things that caused Sharon to change his thinking (despite all the conspiracy and other esoteric explanations offered here).
As far as Hamas is concerned, I find it puzzling that the one thing that is missing in all these discussions here is the nature of the organization itself. Has anybody here taken the trouble to read the Hamas Convention? This is one of the most reactionary movements around today.
Even Fatah attempted to couch its Charter in “progressive” terms of bi-nationalism and human rights. Not so Hamas. The entire premise of their existence – and they spell this out very clearly and explicitly – is that Palestine is only part of the area of the Muslim conquest and that this entire area is part of the Muslim waqf, in perpetuity, as a result of the conquest. Further, the Covenant makes it abundantly clear that any non-Muslims residing within that waqf (that’s rougly from India to southern France!) are second-class dhimmies.
But how is the Israeli exercise of power to exclude so many non-Jews from the Israeli mandate any different from the Hamas Convention’s assertion of a Muslim Palestine? From a human rights standpoint, it is slight.
Furthermore, let’s not forget the Stern gang. Ben Gurion as well as Menachim Begin were terrorists in their days as well. These facts explain why Hamas is taken seriously, but not necessarily 100% literally. As is so well illustrated by the Hamas leadership’s recent overtures to the PA shows, radical positions are bargaining chips.
Jes, if you are so intent on taking Hamas’ positions so literally, are you also applying the same standard to Israeli positions? Indeed, Sharon is now saying that specific settlements in the West Bank will never be given up. Is that a just and reasonable position? Given that the final outcome SHOULD be the result of negotiations among all interested parties, rather than imposed by one, it is an outrageous position, in violation of international law (just as Hamas’ position is), if taken literally. Instead, I consider it, like Hamas’ position on Israel in Palestine, to be a bargaining position.
Both of these examples illustrate that the most important consideration is that the parties actually negotiate. I am most angry at my own government, the U.S., for its failure to exert, for generations now, its utmost pressure on all parties to do so in the interest of resolving the situation.