Hamas as It and Its Neighbors See It

Saturday, 5 September 2009

Hamas as It and Its Neighbors See It

Contributed by Ritalin

What to Make of Hamas, Part I

Michael Thomas

CNI Board Member

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has proven intractable for over six decades. In the past decade, even as Israel, Arab states and Fatah have seemed to be gravitating toward a two-state solution many blame a resistance organization designated terrorist by the United States and Israel as the major obstacle to negotiated peace. As ever, it isn’t that simple. The Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, has the potential either to facilitate movement toward stability and peace, or to add its considerable weight to those on both sides who oppose a negotiated political solution. There is no guarantee that anything the United States does will achieve sustained constructive engagement with Hamas, much less move all the parties to long-term settlement. However, intensive interviews in the region point to the urgent necessity for different American policies and to the likelihood that principled policies, persistently pursued, would substantially improve the odds of success.

Eleven Americans spent seventeen days in May talking to ministers, political leaders and diplomats in Israel and its neighbors, including Gaza and the West Bank. Most of those we talked to had insights and opinions about Hamas. After summarizing the divergent views we heard, I will try to make some sense of the paradoxes that Hamas presents, and discuss what the United States should do going forward.

Hamas on Hamas

We talked to Khalid Meshal, who was recently re-elected the movement’s overall leader as President of the Political Directorate, in Damascus, and to a panel of Hamas leaders in Gaza. We heard a very disciplined, hard-headed set of positions, aimed at convincing Americans both that Hamas cannot be excluded from the political process, and that Hamas is a pragmatic organization offering feasible means of dealing with the most contentious issues. Meshal offered many reasons the US should talk to Hamas, among them that Hamas would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, that it won “ballot legitimacy” in 2006, that its deep roots in Palestinian society were again shown in the recent Israeli offensive, and that it has limited its resistance to the territory it contests, never targeting Americans. Because Hamas is an integral part of Palestinian society and the strongest of the resistance movements, the US could not do anything in the region without talking to it. Meshal professed bewilderment that the US barred all contact with Hamas, when George Mitchell had found it necessary to talk to Sinn Fein in Ireland, Americans had negotiated with the Sunni resistance, and the US was talking through intermediaries with the Taliban. He also argued that the Americans were inconsistent in another way: Hamas was designated a terrorist group for resisting occupation, when the US had armed the Taliban for its violent resistance against Soviet occupation.

Meshal said he knew that the home-made rockets sent into Israel were used by Israelis to chill the peace process, but that the US must understand the terrible effects of IDF attacks on Gazans, to which the rockets responded. In Northern Ireland, reciprocal steps were taken to end violence. Hamas had stopped all violent resistance several times, but Israel and the US failed to use the opportunity to pursue longer-term arrangements. He had told President Carter on his recent visit that if Carter could bring any offer to lift the siege of Gaza, Hamas would enter a ceasefire.

To Meshal’s mind, the US has consistently supported a corrupt Fatah, both before and after they were defeated in free and fair elections, and has forcibly intervened in Palestinian unity talks to prevent Fatah from reaching agreements with Hamas unless Hamas agrees to the Quartet’s conditions on dialogue, which he believes are unreasonable and one-sided. Fatah is only too happy to let the US prop it up and disable its competitor for Palestinian leadership. Meshal points out that Hamas elects its leaders every year, whereas Fatah has not had an election for 21 years. Meshal said that Hamas considers democracy a value, not a tool, and that Hamas would respect the results of any Palestinian election.[1]

What Meshal told us is consistent with what Hamas leaders told us in Gaza, and what Meshal has said elsewhere. In a New York Times interview conducted May 3 and 4, Meshal reconfirmed that Hamas recognizes the authority of Mahmud Abbas as chair of the PLO to conduct final status negotiations with Israel, and that Hamas would be bound by any such agreement once it had been ratified by a referendum of Palestinians.[2] Given that any such agreement would involve recognition of Israel, territorial compromises and an end to revanchist claims, and a final arrangement for refugees, he was saying that Hamas would abandon all positions inconsistent with those compromises. This is what he meant when he said that, while no progress can be sustained without Hamas, Hamas would always be part of the solution.

Hamas leaders in Gaza gave us a more detailed understanding of their reluctance to meet the Quartet’s conditions (recognize Israel, accept prior agreements with Israel, and reject violence). They said that they have learned to be cautious after the PLO agreed to a series of similar conditions in the Oslo accords only to find that Israel did not keep its bargains and the plight of the Palestinians grew worse. As to recognizing Israel, they ask what Israel it is they are asked to recognize, given that Israel has never declared its final borders or accepted the constraints of UN resolutions; they also argue that no occupied people should ever be asked to recognize its occupier on the occupier’s terms, especially when the occupier does not recognize their rights. As to prior agreements, they point out that Israel has not implemented, or now repudiates, major parts of those agreements, including the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, the Annapolis framework, and the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access. And as to repudiating violence, they again ask for assurances that Israel would be similarly bound.

We were in Gaza while sporadic negotiations between Hamas and Fatah were being conducted in Cairo, and Hamas leaders gave a detailed briefing on each of the five sets of issues under discussion there. They said that all agreed on the need for an interim government until new elections could be held, but that there were substantial problems with the program of such a government, and significant interference by Israel and the US, essentially preventing Abbas from agreeing to anything until Hamas had adopted the Quartet requirements, and preventing any Hamas to participation in West Bank governance. Specifically with respect to security forces, Fatah wanted “reform” only in Gaza, leaving the West Bank under the program overseen by US General Dayton.[3] As it turned out, negotiations foundered on such issues. The impression left, both by Hamas spokesmen and by Fatah, was that each side was loathe to surrender any measure of control it currently had, and calculated that time would be its friend. This impression was shared by spokesmen for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, who complained that only Egypt seemed to have a sense of urgency about the unity talks they were hosting.

Hamas spokesmen were anxious to dispel any image of their organization as extreme or unreasonable. The first thing said by the Gaza group was that they had “adopted the West’s politics of pragmatism.” They were a civil movement, which took its education and principles from Islam but were not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews. Rather, it was a liberation movement against Zionist exclusion, which conducted resistance operations only in the land of Palestine. In other words, they were engaged in national liberation, not global jihad. And when asked whether Hamas would seek to impose a sharia regime, Meshal said that the people would choose both their representatives and the nature of the system of government.

Hamas as Seen by Others

Needless to say, American diplomats did not share Hamas’s benign view of itself. One senior diplomat in Israel did give Hamas a back-handed compliment. He described a constant “philosophical struggle” with the Israelis, who obsessed on immediate security issues, while the US was trying to get them to focus on steps that would achieve longer-term goals of stability and peace. He said that, in contrast, Hamas thought very long term. The problem was that their long-term goal was the destruction of Israel. As to the Gaza blockade, he spent fully half his time trying to get the Israelis to lengthen the list of goods they would allow into Gaza, but this effort was constrained by the fact that the US did not want “to strengthen Hamas.” This refusal to do anything that could be seen as “strengthening” Hamas was echoed by US diplomats in Damascus and Cairo. Thus, even though 1.5 million Palestinians are being impoverished and driven to despair by the siege and killed and maimed by military incursions, America so fears the possibility that allowing them a normal life would be claimed as a “victory” by Hamas that the blockade, an act of war and a means of collective punishment, has to continue.[4] The diplomat in Cairo admitted that the policy of squeezing Hamas into defeat had not worked, and said that alternatives were being sought. We saw no evidence of change.

Meshal was provided sanctuary in Damascus after Mossad assassination attempts in Jordan during Netanyahu’s earlier stint as Prime Minister. American diplomats in Syria are not allowed to speak to him, a point underlined for us when Meshal and the American charge’ carefully avoided each other at a Norwegian National Day party where Meshal spoke to everyone else present. A senior American diplomat in Damascus argued that contact with Hamas was a more difficult issue than the decision to open dialogue with the PLO in 1988, because then the bar on contact had been a matter of policy only, while the current bar is a matter of statute.[5]

We suggested to this same American official that the US could deal with Hamas as the US (through George Mitchell) had dealt with the Republican movement in Ireland, by limiting contact with political officers until the parties committed to exclusively political means. The response was that the analogy was flawed. In Northern Ireland, the argument went, the British wanted a deal, but were being held hostage by the Orange. There was no existential issue for the British, whereas the Israelis see Hamas, for good reason, as a threat to Israel’s existence. That seems frankly like a distinction without a difference, or perhaps with a difference that makes contact more desirable rather than less. The first question is whether we, like the British in Ireland, see dialogue as desirable (and perhaps are being held hostage by the Israelis). If so, then given Hamas’s decision to participate in the political process and its evident urgent desire for contact, the only challenge is to frame the contact in a way that maximizes the likelihood of progress toward permanent solutions and minimizes damage to present interests. There is no existential threat to the US, and surely we can frame and limit contact so that it does not increase the threat to Israel. From Israel’s perspective, the important question may be not whether Hamas is a threat, but what Israel wants. If it wants division of the Palestinians in order to avoid the need to negotiate seriously, current policies are increasing that division; our diplomat in Cairo thought it an open question whether this would be Bibi’s plan. If Israel wants to negotiate with a partner that can actually implement agreements, it needs to find a way to encourage unification behind credible Palestinian leaders. It has tried military attacks against Hamas and strangulation of the population in which Hamas lives, and has failed to destroy or starve Hamas. Testing their willingness to reach sustainable political compromises may be the most fruitful, least costly alternative.

Aside from the “rejectionist front” (the US, Israel and Fatah), everyone we spoke to urged contact with Hamas. This was true of Syrian officials, of course, but also Egyptians (officials, scholars, and dissidents), Palestinian independents, UN officials, and Israelis who were not in the government. The current policy of trying to break Hamas by means of military strikes and collective punishment was uniformly seen as counterproductive, quite apart from whether it was also illegal or immoral. And the idea of conditioning contact on the Quartet’s three demands was generally seen as one-sided and unrealistic.

John Ging, the director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, believed that the Quartet conditions were reasonable goals, but that they should be the subject of credible reciprocal agreements. Having dealt with the devastating human damage caused by the blockade of Gaza and Operation Cast Lead, he was particularly caustic and eloquent on the failure of Israel to live up to the terms of the Agreement on Movement and Access negotiated by Secretary Rice in 2005, and the new government’s explicit repudiation of the Annapolis framework and major parts of other agreements. An Irishman, he described how helpful it had been for Jerry Adams to visit Gaza and talk about how reciprocal steps had been effective in giving the parties in Ireland confidence to turn from violence to political compromise.

Independent Palestinian leaders we talked to agreed. Sharhabeel Alzaeem, an international trade lawyer in Gaza, was no advocate for Hamas, his children having been roughed up because of his independent stance.[6] But he was certain that Hamas leaders would take steps quickly if assured of Israeli reciprocity. He and a group of five independent political leaders agreed that contact with Hamas by George Mitchell would moderate Hamas, not strengthen it. One expressed the view that exclusion of Hamas had pushed it to take a harder line than it would otherwise take.

Hamas spokesmen all said that they recognized the need for new elections, and that they would abide the results of any election. There was broad agreement among all Palestinians that new elections were necessary in order to produce a credible Palestinian leadership, but the obstacles are great. Each party would have to be given the opportunity to organize and campaign in territory now controlled by the other, and even if all Palestinian parties agreed to terms, Israel would have to power to disrupt and prevent a competitive election. As to how either Fatah or Hamas would do in an election if one were held now, the opinions we heard were surprising. The independent leaders in Gaza, as well as Mustafa Barghouthi in the West Bank, all believed that Hamas would lose ground as compared with 2006 in Gaza, but that they would gain in the West Bank – in other words, that the party which has been in control of an area has alienated voters in that area. The independents generally thought that neither Fatah nor Hamas would get over 25% of the vote overall, meaning that independents would make up a majority. That would require coalition government, and could involve a splintering as unstable as that in Israel. Alzaeem believed that Hamas would join a collation government and take five or six ministries, in part to enable them to travel abroad as ministers.

Whatever the accuracy of these electoral predictions, it is clear that Hamas has a substantial and lasting advantage based upon its delivery of services – schools, clinics, family support – and its disciplined cadre. This advantage, remarked on by some of the independents, was reinforced by the impression made by Dr. Zakaria Al-Agha, a Fatah member who is a member of the PLO Executive Committee and chair of its Refugee Affairs Department. A member of the Old Guard of Fatah from Central Casting, Dr Al-Agha seemed tired, discouraged and despondent. He had been involved in the Cairo negotiations (and had been stopped and stripped of his papers by Hamas security), and he believed that Hamas would not make concessions because they were negotiating from strength. His prediction was that, if conditions in Gaza remained what they were, Hamas would win a resounding victory in any election.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry has had a unique perspective on efforts to deal with Hamas. The Egyptian regime fears an armed and empowered Hamas as a child of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt has had a long and troubled relationship with Gaza, but does not want to be responsible for massive human misery there, or to be seen among Arabs as the co-jailor with Israel. Accordingly, they have been working to get the parties to share responsibility. We were told by Deputy Assistant Foreign Minister Amin Meleika and Ambassador Yasser Osman, head of the Palestine Department, that the blockade radicalized everyone, but that each side was trying to use the crisis to leverage their own power, and would not agree to cooperative ways to manage the crossings. In unification talks, the security issue was a major obstacle because unification would require concessions by both camps, and the US opposes any role for Hamas in the West Bank. Likewise, the US vetoed a caretaker government until elections could be held in January of 2010. Egypt proposed a joint committee established just to run the election, but that would also require Hamas access to the West Bank and Fatah access to Gaza. It was their opinion that Hamas would not do well in any election.

As to US contact with Hamas, the Egyptians said that the Mitchell mission cannot advance if it does not deal with Hamas. And for Hamas to recognize Israel as a condition of such contact would destroy its raison d’être.

One of the most interesting sets of insights about Hamas was from Daniel Ben-Simon, the leader of the Labor bloc in the Knesset. Ben-Simon was elected leader of the greatly diminished Labor faction as a freshman this year, attesting both to his reputation gained as a political commentator and author, and to the desperate need for new spokesmen for the party. Ben-Simon believed that Israeli voters would in fact approve of dealing with Hamas, if they believed that the result of the negotiation was good. However, the fear of doing anything that recognizes or strengthens Hamas is so great that Olmert killed a negotiated prisoner exchange that would have freed Galid Schalit. In part, the concern is that they cannot deal with Hamas and maintain a relationship with Fatah; Abbas and the PA have essentially said to them, “Do a deal with Hamas and we go away.” Another reason that Hamas is shunned is the effect of the Israeli right’s antipathy to negotiations on Palestinian issues. Ben-Simon said that the right really likes having a schism in Palestinian leadership: “It’s so nice when they kill each other.”

More of the Same?

What seems clear from the summary above is that the question of what to do about Hamas, like many issues of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, is difficult in large part because several players with significant power to affect events have motivations to disrupt progress, or insufficient reason to concede leverage they now have. The result is not a “status quo,” in the sense of a static set of conditions. The two-state solution, nearly everyone now agrees, is both desirable and receding rapidly from view. The people of Gaza are more impoverished and desperate, and the youth there less understanding of the benefits of co-existence, with each passing month. US policy must reflect, protect, and advance American interests, which include a secure Israel, a stable Middle East, and consistency between proclaimed American values and what we do. US policy has not even begun to accomplish those goals, to the great detriment of millions of people and the future prospects of peace. American policy must change.

Click for parts two and three.

[1] Meshal made every effort to identify his movement with American values, giving each of his visitors a small framed representation of Jerusalem’s holy sites. He said this is how Hamas sees Jerusalem, as a place where the three great religions can live together in peace. He stressed this ecumenical approach in his speech of June 25, 2009, contrasting the Palestinian history of several faiths sharing the land with the exclusivist Jewish claims outlined by Prime Minister Netanyahu in his recent speech.

[2] This is not a new Hamas position. Hamas approved the May 2006 National Conciliation Document, negotiated by leaders of Hamas, Fatah and other organizations in Israeli jails (and also called the Prisoners’ Document). That document provides for making Hamas a constituent organization of the PLO, for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, and for a National Unity Government to include “especially Fatah and Hamas.” It also recognizes the authority of the PLO or president of the PNA to negotiate final status, subject to ratification by the PNC or referendum. Before 2005, Hamas had rejected membership in the PLO because the PLO had recognized Israel and participated in the peace process; Hamas signed the March 17, 2005 Cairo document that said that all factions must be brought into the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that all must accept a state with Jerusalem as its capital.

[3] Dayton’s program has claimed significant success in integrating and training PA security forces, and those forces are being given increasing responsibility in “Area A” towns that were to be PA-controlled under Oslo. However, many Palestinians see it as a program to have the PA administer the occupation for Israel. This view was bluntly confirmed when Dayton, in a May 7, 2009 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an AIPAC spinoff, bragged that during Cast Lead, the PA forces he had trained suppressed Palestinian opposition to Cast Lead in the West Bank, and allowed “a good portion of the Israeli army” to go “off to Gaza from the West Bank.”

[4] John Ging of UNRWA estimated that the number of Gazans who wanted Israel destroyed numbered in five figures, but said that as a new generation grows up with no understanding of Israelis except as military oppressors, Gaza will become the “hostile entity” that Israel declared it to be in 2007.

[5] I will argue in Part II that the statutory bar is only as strong as the administration wants it to be.

[6] Alzaeem noted wryly that as to corruption, the issue that lost Fatah many voters in the 2006 elections, Hamas leaders were “quick learners.” He could identify $700 million in proceeds from illicit tunnel traffic that was unaccounted for, and there were at least a dozen Hamas leaders who were suddenly wealthy. Nevertheless, it is his view that corruption is worse in Israel than it is in the occupied territories.

Tags: Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Islamists, Israel, Khaled Meshaal, Middle East, Middle East Peace, Palestine

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