After Hamas’s Hudna, what?

On Monday, I blogged some excerpts from the informal interview I had with the close-to-Hamas scholar and media mogul Dr Azzam Tamimi, earlier in the day.
He read the blog post, and emailed me that he found the comments there very interesting. He added, “In fact the question about what comes after Hudnah is answered in my book.”
He then copied into the email the following text which he describes as “an excerpt from the draft of my book.” I think he was referring to this book, Hamas: Unwritten Chapters, which is due to be published this July here in London. (It seems to be an updated edition of this 2007 volume.)

What comes after hudnah?
by Azzam Tamimi
Hamas is silent about what happens when a long-term hudnah signed with the Israelis expires. While its leaders have left open the length of the hudnah term, considering this to be a subject for negotiation with the Israelis once they accepted the principle, they generally suggest that the future should be left for future generations.
It is usually assumed that a long term hudnah will likely last for a quarter of a century or more. That is seen as too long a time for someone to predict what may happen afterwards. There will always be the possibility that the hudnah will come to an end prematurely because of a breach. If that happens it is highly unlikely that the breach will come from the Hamas side for the simply reason that it is religiously binding upon the Islamic side to honor the agreement to the end unless violated by the other side. Should the hudnah last till the prescribed date, one scenario is that those in charge then will simply negotiation a renewal.
Another scenario that is prevalent within the thinking of some intellectual Hamas quarters is that so much will change in the world that Israel as a Zionist entity may not want, or may not have the ability, to continue to be in existence. As a matter of principle Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together in the region as they lived together for many centuries before. What Islamists usually have in mind is an Islamic state, a Caliphate, which is envisaged to encompass much of the Middle East in an undoing of the fragmentation the region was forced to undergo due to 19th century colonialism and then in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The entities created in the process became separate ‘territorial states’ in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman order in the second decade of the 20th century. While Israel as an exclusive state for the Jews in Palestine is something an Islamic movement such as Hamas can never recognize as legitimate, the Jews can easily be accommodated as legitimate citizens of a multi-faith, multi-racial state governed by Islam. The post-Israel scenario, which has become a subject for debate within the movement, is one that envisages a Palestine, or a united Middle East, with a Jewish population but no political Zionism. This is a vision inspired by the South African reconciliation model that brought Apartheid to an end but kept all communities living together. Zionism is usually equated to Apartheid and its removal is seen as the way forward if Muslims, Christians and Jews were ever to coexist in peace in the region. It would be impossible for such a scenario to translate into a reality without a long-term hudnah that for the life time of an entire generation provides communities and peoples in the region the opportunity to restore some normalcy into their lives.
Those who are skeptical about the hudnah may argue that it means nothing but a prelude to finishing Israel altogether. But without hudnah too the Palestinians will still dream of the day on which Palestine, their country, is free and their right of return to their homes is restored. Without a hudnah there is no guarantee that they will cease to pursue that end using whatever means that are at their disposal. The advantage of the hudnah is that it brings to an end the bloodshed and the suffering because of the commitment to do so for a given period of time. In the meantime, let each side dream of what they wish the future to look like while keeping the door open for all sorts of options. Under normal circumstances, the best option is the least costly option.