Exposing the Lie of Hamas Moderation
June 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Hamas seems to be begging Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, The Sequel. 45 rockets were fired by Hamas into Israel on Tuesday following the cross-border attack from Egyptian territory on Monday, confining much of southern Israel to bomb shelters. There is never an excuse for rockets directed toward civilians, and Hamas is barely even pretending to have a justification this time around. Hamas claims that the rocket barrage is a response to Israeli airstrikes, but the real reason Hamas is now returning to its strategy of indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians is that it is beginning to feel squeezed by other groups that are questioning Hamas’s commitment to armed resistance. As pointed out in the New York Times, Islamic Jihad’s more militant approach has garnered it growing popularity and Hamas does not want to be eclipsed by its smaller competitors. More saliently though, the attack on Monday coming from the Sinai and for which a group claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaida has claimed responsibility put even more pressure on Hamas, since it cannot afford to be seen sitting on the sidelines while an outside non-Palestinian group carries the banner of resistance against Israel. Hamas is madly trying to reestablish its credentials of taking the fight to Israel, and it does so by firing rockets from Gaza because it has no other long term strategy and no interest in a productive solution. It is being tarred as too compliant and willing to live with the status quo, and so Israeli civilians have to bear the brunt of it reflexing its muscles. Let’s also not pretend that any of this is a “legitimate response to Israeli aggression” since it’s pretty clear who made the first move here, not to mention that purposely targeting civilian communities with rockets is never a legitimate response to anything.
Hamas is gambling that with Israeli tanks moving toward the Egyptian border and Iran presumably occupying the Israeli defense ministry’s attention, the IDF will have neither the time or the inclination to bother with a large scale response to rocket fire that has thankfully not killed any Israelis yet. This is a bad miscalculation on Hamas’s part. Israel’s first priority is protecting its citizens from attack, and should this rocket fire continue, I fully expect to see an IDF incursion into Gaza. Israel is not going to be frightened off by a Morsi victory in Egypt, and is also unlikely to sit back and absorb rocket fire as a favor to the Egyptian military, which does not want to be pressured by public opinion into fighting Hamas’s battles. This is not destined to end well for Hamas should it provoke a real Israeli response, and yet Hamas is bafflingly more concerned with not being outshined by smaller resistance groups.
In this vein, the most important takeaway from this episode is that it is time to lay to rest forever the idea that Hamas is moderating or will moderate. When Israel pulled out of Gaza and Hamas took control of the strip from the Palestinian Authority, I thought there was a small but legitimate chance that Hamas would begin to transition away from terrorizing Israeli civilians and start focusing on governance. Any hopes I had on this front have been thoroughly dashed. Despite the recent relative quiet, it is clear that Hamas is not changing. It remains a revanchist group dedicated not to building a state but to seeking the elimination of Israel entirely, and it continues to be a hostage to small bore thinking without seeing the larger trends at work in the region. Islamist groups throughout the Middle East, from Ennahda in Tunisia to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are devoting their attention to governing, and while they are not necessarily forces for moderation or social progress, they recognize that the key to long term survival and relevance is basic party politics and the nitty gritty of learning how to run a state. Hamas evinces zero interest in following this path, which should permanently kill the notion that it is a legitimate Islamist political party that also happens to have a military wing. It is everlastingly obsessed with the idea of resistance above state building, purity above compromise. Is there anyone left still so naive as to think that a complete and total Israeli pullout from the West Bank would put an end to Hamas rockets, attacks on civilians, and efforts to abduct Israeli soldiers? Rather than prepare its constituents to live with the inevitability of Israel and attempt to improve their lot, Hamas is more concerned with looking tough and whether other groups are damaging its street cred. What a terrible and pathetic representative for the people of Gaza.
Look at the revolutionary trends rocking the rest of the Arab world, and then compare that to the stale stasis that grips Hamas as it remains impervious to change or adaptation and refuses to embrace any new role other than resistance in the form of barbarism. It is as it always was: an opaque organization with a super secretive process for selecting its leaders and making decisions, with the only difference that it now shoots rockets at Israeli civilians rather than blowing them up on buses or in cafes. I desperately think that Israel needs to deal with the Palestinian Authority to end the occupation of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state, but Hamas is an altogether different breed and its actions yesterday were the latest abundantly clear demonstration of this. The attack from the Sinai and the rockets from Gaza are an important reminder that Israel lives in a nasty neighborhood and that there are some things which it will never be able to inoculate itself against no matter how it resolves the Palestinian issue. Nobody argues that Israel is threatening or occupying any part of Egypt and yet it still faces attacks coming from the Sinai, which pose a terrible dilemma for Jerusalem since it does not want to enter into any hostilities with the Egyptians but cannot afford to just let these provocations continue. This is where the double standard that governs all things Israeli kicks in, since every country in the world has the absolute right to respond to cross-border attacks (and this applies both to Egypt and Gaza) but by doing so Israel walks into an inevitable public relations trap. If Israel goes back into Gaza, every Palestinian civilian life that is lost will be an unqualified tragedy, but it will be entirely on Hamas’s head.
This Is Not A Recipe For Hamas Moderation
April 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk gave an interview to the Forward – and the more I read that sentence, the funnier it seems – in which he staked out a number of hardline positions to the right of his rival Khaled Meshaal. Most importantly, he said that any agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel will be considered a temporary hudna rather than a permanent peace treaty once Hamas is in power, and that he and his organization would feel free to unilaterally modify any deals that were previously struck. He also reiterated his position that Hamas would never recognize Israel, nor will it accept the Quartet’s conditions for negotiations. None of this, of course, is at all surprising.
While there will undoubtedly be much ink spilled over the fact that Abu Marzouk is pushing for a hudna rather than eternal armed conflict, the contents of the interview do not provide cause for optimism. Abu Marzouk implied that a temporary truce would not be a confidence building measure leading toward negotiations but an opportunity for Hamas to build up its capabilities without being hassled. He also scorned the idea that armed resistance should be abandoned in favor of mass non-violent resistance, and gave conflicting signals over the issue of killing civilians, defending past attacks on Israelis but then saying that targeting civilians is not Hamas policy. In addition, he disavowed the notion that Jews everywhere are responsible for anything that Israel does and tacitly acknowledged the Holocaust (“If you look carefully at what happened to the Jews in Moscow or Madrid, in Spain or in Germany or Poland, that’s very bad…. Anyone who historically his father or grandfather did something like that [to the Jews], he should be ashamed.”).
Evidence of moderation on targeting civilians, absence of Holocaust denial, giving an interview to a Jewish newspaper…I’m not really buying it. This interview is a classic example of Abu Marzouk saying a bunch of things to appeal to a Western audience without giving in on the important stuff. The only question that actually matters is whether Hamas will honor PA agreements, because given the attempt at a unity deal between it and Fatah and the possibility that it may one day soon control the PA, Hamas has to be trusted to make credible commitments. If Abu Marzouk is to be believed, Hamas cannot be trusted on that score. Netanyahu gets plenty of flack for not actually wanting to negotiate a deal that the Palestinians will be able to accept, but with all of the Fatah infighting and now a clear statement from one of Hamas’s top three officials that it won’t abide by any deals anyway, what’s the point of the entire peace process exercise? I think that Israel needs to get out of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state, but it is madness to think that it is only the Israeli side that is obstructing such an outcome.
Meshaal’s position as political director is not assured, and Abu Marzouk’s tacking to the right on the question of accepting a permanent treaty – something that Meshaal has said he is willing to do following a Palestinian referendum – has got to be seen as campaign maneuvering. Nobody really knows what is going on in Hamas internal politics and what the Shura Council’s members are thinking, but to give an interview like this that is designed to attract attention from a number of distinct audiences says a couple of things. First, Abu Marzouk thinks that Meshaal is playing to public opinion with his embrace of the Arab Spring rather than worrying about the Shura Council, which is the only audience that matters in terms of deciding who is going to lead Hamas. His staking out positions that conflict with Meshaal’s is deliberate, and he must suspect that a more hardline position is going to be popular with the folks who matter. Second, he thinks that he stands a good chance of beating Meshaal and is already looking ahead to convincing Western audiences that he should not be shunned, which explains his position on Jews vs. Israelis and sympathy for Holocaust (and pogrom and Inquisition) victims. Expressing moderation on those issues is not going to win him accolades with Hamas’s leadership or rank and file, and I suspect that giving an interview to the Forward falls under the same category, and the only reason for someone like Abu Marzouk to try to curry favor with Westerners is because he plans on dealing with them in the future.
Assuming that Abu Marzouk’s thinking is correct and that a harder line is going to be more popular, it is also not going to do any wonders for Hamas’s alleged moderation. Just like in presidential primaries, a hardline position will bring everyone else along, including Meshaal. Hamas is not moderate or accommodationist, and there are plenty of good reasons to doubt that it will ever follow Fatah’s path in recognizing Israel, but at least it has been relatively quiet militarily lately. Abu Marzouk is not advocating in this interview for an immediate resumption of unrelenting hostilities as he thinks that a hudna is a good idea, but the rejection of a permanent peace treaty at any point and no matter the circumstance is designed to send the message that at the end of the day, Hamas is a military organization. This not so subtle reminder can only push Hamas toward its most extreme tendencies, and signals that Hamas’s version of Salam Fayyad is nowhere on the horizon.
A Study in Contrasts
April 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
Omar al-Hayeb is a member of a legendary Bedouin family in Israel. The al-Hayebs were founding members of the IDF’s Desert Reconnaissance Battalion, which is composed of Bedouin volunteers (Bedouins are exempt from serving in the IDF) who serve as expert trackers, and Omar al-Hayeb was the highest ranking Bedouin member of the IDF while serving as a tracker along the northern border. In 2006, he was found guilty of espionage and drug trafficking on behalf of Hizballah after being caught in 2002 with classified maps of IDF troop positions and lists of IDF communications channels while on his way to a meeting with Hizballah members. Al-Hayeb’s story is a sad one in that he was severely injured by a Hizballah roadside bomb in 1996 and lost an eye as a result, and he ended up selling drugs supplied by the same organization that was responsible for his injury in order to make ends meet. Yesterday, Israel released al-Hayeb from prison after his sentence had already been commuted once before because he is in poor health and is deemed not to be a threat to the state.
On Saturday, Hamas hanged three men in Gaza, one of whom was convicted of spying for Israel. Palestinian law imposes the death penalty for treason and for drug trafficking, so if al-Hayeb had been a Palestinian subject to either Hamas’s or the PA’s jurisdiction, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Israel is far from perfect, but its behavior in the West Bank sometimes makes people forget that its liberal democratic ethos stands in stark contrast to that of its neighbors. This is one of those times.
Erdoğan and Meshaal
March 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
Khaled Meshaal is in Turkey today for meetings with Prime Minister Erdoğan in what is no doubt the latest effort on Turkey’s part to broker a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. Last month Mahmoud Abbas was in Ankara for talks with Erdoğan, Davutoğlu, and Gül, and Turkey has for years now tried to be the middleman in getting the two sides to make up. It is not a role that it wishes to cede to Egypt, and with Cairo in the news for brokering a ceasefire between Israel and various Palestinian factions following the fighting in Gaza earlier this week, Erdoğan would love to make some news of his own on the Palestinian front.
There was speculation about where the Hamas leadership was going to go once it decamped from Damascus with Istanbul seen as a leading contender, but so far some Hamas officials have gone to Cairo and others – including Meshaal – have gone to Doha. I wonder if Erdoğan is going to make an increased push with Meshaal today to host them in Turkey. The Turks have taken up the Palestinian cause with gusto in an effort to increase their popularity and expand their soft power in the Arab world, and that is likely to figure into their strategy even more now that they have given up on Assad and are still feuding with the Israelis. Hosting the Hamas leadership gives Turkey a lot of street cred, and has the added benefit of demonstrating Turkey’s distance from the Assad regime by accepting a group that has publicly turned on its former Syrian patron. The risks of course are that too much cozying up to Hamas upsets the U.S. and the E.U., but Erdoğan and Davutoğlu generally tend to side with risking some unpleasantness in Washington and European capitals if they stand to benefit elsewhere.
The other benefit to hosting Meshaal right now is that Erdoğan gets to stick it to Israel a few days after the Israelis issued a travel warning for its citizens in Turkey. Lots of public displays of friendship between Erdoğan and Davutoğlu and Meshaal will rile the Israelis up as it always does, and any talk of improved ties and resumed military coordination will again end with no tangible gains.
What Is Iran’s Future In Gaza?
March 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
In a special Knesset session today called specifically to focus on “the political, economic, and social failures of Netanyahu’s government” the PM asserted that “Gaza is Iran” and blamed those who supported the 2005 disengagement from Gaza for allowing Iran a foothold right on Israel’s border. For those not following terribly closely, the implication is that Hamas is Iran’s close ally and allowing Iranian agents to operate in Gaza with impunity. However, as Jonathan Schanzer makes clear over at Foreign Policy, while Iran is most likely behind the recent spate of rocket fire, the Iranians are working at cross-purposes with Hamas this time around. Schanzer argues that Hamas desperately wants to avoid a war given its leadership’s exit from Syria and newly shaky position, and indeed senior Hamas leaders have explicitly committed themselves to stay out of any war between Israel and Iran. For the first time since joining forces, Iran and Hamas appear to have different interests and it is causing a real split.
This view strikes me as correct, but the interesting question is whether this is only a short-term shift or whether the Hamas-Iran de facto alliance is over for good. Hamas’s relationship with Iran was born out of necessity; it did not have the backing of secular Sunni dictators like Hosni Mubarak, and so it was not going to eschew the backing of an Islamic regime that was a sworn enemy of Israel, even if Iran was a Shia state. Iranian backing allowed Hamas’s leaders to set up shop in Damascus under the protection of Iranian proxy Bashar al-Assad, and Iran has bankrolled Hamas for over a decade. It is unclear whether Hamas can afford to pay any of its employees in Gaza if Iran withdraws its financial support, and so despite the current rift Hamas might eventually have to come to terms with the fact that it can’t live without Iran and go back to being more compliant with its wishes.
On the other hand, the Arab Spring and the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt means that Hamas is no longer as politically isolated as it once was. Hamas leaders have already moved on to Cairo and Doha, and it is no stretch to think that their money problems might soon be solved by more friendly Sunni governments. More importantly, Iran’s pitting of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees against Hamas is destined to drive Hamas farther away from Iran rather than intimidating them into returning to the fold. The same folks who had no problem throwing Fatah members off the roofs of 15 story buildings are unlikely to be squeamish against cracking down on PIJ and PRC fighters when push comes to shove (pun intended). Hamas is in a better position geopolitically than it was when it needed to rely on Iranian largesse, and this spat might signal a permanent split.
My guess is that the latter position is the correct one, and that Hamas is going to permanently move away from Iran, even once events in Syria are sorted out, and into the orbit of similarly minded Sunni Islamist governments. Hamas is no longer so desperate as to accept help from just anyone, and wants to permanently disassociate itself from unpopular governments now that one of the main lessons of the Arab Spring is that Arab public opinion matters. Keep this in mind when hearing Israeli politicians or Middle East analysts link Iran and Hamas together in Gaza. Each presents a unique set of challenges in its own right, and while the connection between the two was strong for a decade, it is likely soon to come to a close.
