The Turkish Government’s Journey Down The Rabbit Hole
July 18, 2014 § 9 Comments
If Prime Minister Erdoğan is to be taken at his word, we can officially declare Israeli-Turkish rapprochement dead. Speaking this morning, Erdoğan announced that under no circumstances will Turkey’s relationship with Israel improve as long as he is in power – which after the presidential elections next month, will be for a long time – and that the West can protest all it likes to no avail. Erdoğan also accused Israel of committing genocide and of knowing best how to kill children, which was a repeat performance from yesterday when he alleged that Israel has been committing systematic genocide against Palestinians during every Ramadan since 1948. This comes after more delightful outbursts earlier this week, during which Erdoğan claimed that there have been no rockets fired into Israel since there have been no Israeli deaths and compared Israeli MK Ayelet Shaked to Hitler, among other things.
Never one to be left out of the action, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu accused Israel of crimes against humanity and revealed that he has never taken Israel Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman seriously (although to be fair, that last point bolsters the case for Davutoğlu’s good sense). Ankara’s mayor Melih Gökçek, fresh off the heels of tweeting out pro-Hitler sentiments, urged his government yesterday to shut down the Israeli embassy in Ankara, referring to it as “the despicable murderers’ consulate” and stating that “they are 100 times more murderous than Hitler.” Not to be outdone, Bülent Yıldırım, the odious head of the “humanitarian relief NGO” IHH – the same NGO that organized the Mavi Marmara flotilla – warned Jewish tourists (yes, he said Jewish rather than Israeli, and yes, that was deliberate on his part) not to show their faces in Turkey and threatened Turkish Jews that they would pay dearly for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
While Yıldırım may have come to the conclusion of collective Jewish guilt on his own, he also could have been influenced by Yeni Akit reporter Faruk Köse. Köse wrote an open letter in his newspaper on Tuesday to the chief rabbi of Turkey in which the phrase “Siyonist/Yahudi Terör Üssü” – which translates to Zionist/Jewish terror base and is his oh-so-clever term for Israel – appeared seven times while he demanded that the rabbi and his flock apologize for Gaza because Turkey’s Jews have lived among Turks for 500 years and gotten rich off them and now support the terrorist Israeli state. Or perhaps Yıldırım is a dedicated reader of Daily Sabah, the English language AKP propaganda organ where Melih Altınok argued yesterday that not only Turkish Jews but Jews everywhere need to, in his words, “make a historic gesture” and denounce Israel publicly. According to his logic, Israel’s actions are solely responsible for increasing anti-Semitism in the world, and “hence, nationalist Jews as well as the humanist and anti-war Jews have to calculate the situation” and do what is necessary in order to stem the inevitable backlash against them. Lovely, no?
What a surprise and shock it must have been then when last night, mobs that included MPs from the AKP attacked the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul, leading Israel to reduce its diplomatic staff in the country and to send the families of diplomatic staff home. The police in Ankara, who are never hesitant to break out the tear gas, truncheons, and water cannons against Turkish civilians protesting things like government corruption, were mysteriously somehow powerless this time as they stood on the sidelines and watched. Of course, there can’t possibly be a connection between the rhetoric of high government officials lambasting Israel as a genocidal terror state and mobs attacking Israel’s diplomatic missions and chanting for murder, right? This is clearly all a misunderstanding and emanates not from Erdoğan using ugly and hateful tactics to improve his political standing but completely and entirely from Israel’s actions. Now please excuse me while I go wash off the sarcasm dripping from my keyboard.
I understand why Turks are upset about the images and news reports coming out of Gaza. Just as Diaspora Jews feel a deep sense of kinship and brotherhood with their Jewish brethren in Israel, there is a genuine sense of pan-Muslim solidarity between Turks and Palestinians. While I believe that Israel tries in good faith to minimize civilian casualties, not only do mistakes happen but sometimes Israel makes intentional decisions – like every other country in the history of the world that has ever fought a war – that it knows will lead to civilian deaths. I get the anger and frustration, and I see it personally from Turkish friends on my Facebook feed and my Twitter stream, who are furious with Israel not because they are Jew-hating anti-Semites but because they deplore the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, which they see as disproportionate and excessive. And it isn’t just the AKP; anger at Israel is widespread among all segments of the population, as evidenced by the multiple leftist Gaza solidarity rallies taking place in Turkey today and by joint CHP/MHP presidential candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu bashing Israel’s actions in Gaza and the CHP generally trying to score points over the last few days by absurdly trying to paint the AKP as in bed with Israel and complicit with its actions. Israel isn’t exactly popular in Turkey, to make the understatement of the decade, and to expect Turkish politicians to hold their tongues completely or to support Israel’s actions in Gaza is unreasonably naive.
But there is a world of difference between criticizing Israel out of a deeply held difference of opinion versus comparing Israelis to Hitler, equating Israel with Nazi Germany, throwing around the term genocide, openly advocating violence against Israeli nationals and property, and threatening Jews over Israel’s behavior. It is completely beyond the pale, and anyone who cares a lick about liberal values should be denouncing it loud and clear without qualification. Erdoğan is appealing to the darkest forces imaginable in order to win a presidential election and bolster his laughably pathetic standing in the Arab world, and let’s not forget that he said straight out today that he will never normalize or even improve relations with Israel while he is in office. He has dropped the charade that this has anything to do with the Mavi Marmara or even a set of fulfillable demands that Israel is not meeting, so let’s all remember that the next time someone blames Israel for the impasse in the bilateral relationship. Erdoğan is anti-Israel because he does not like Israel, full stop. If Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza, stopped responding to Hamas rockets with missiles, ended the blockade, and awarded Khaled Meshaal the Israel Prize, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu would just find some other reason not to normalize relations. Yes, the situation in Gaza undoubtedly plays a big role in all of this – just look at Israeli-Turkish relations under the Erdoğan government between 2002 and 2008, which were cordial and cooperative – but it’s about more than that at this point. Erdoğan and the AKP have gone too far down the garden path of anti-Israel rhetoric at this point to ever turn back.
Why A Gaza Ceasefire Is So Difficult
July 16, 2014 § 1 Comment
There was a strong expectation in Israel yesterday once the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire terms were announced that Hamas was going to accept the deal. Even after Hamas rejected the terms and launched 80 more rockets at Israel yesterday morning, some prominent voices, such as former Israel national security adviser Giora Eiland, were predicting that Hamas would ultimately accept the deal today. While anything may still happen, it is highly unlikely given Hamas’s vociferous objections to terms that are essentially a replica of the 2012 ceasefire agreement and Hamas’s release of its own offer this morning, which calls for an end to the Gaza blockade, the release of any prisoners swept up over the last month who had been released in the Gilad Shalit deal in 2011, building an airport and seaport in Gaza, expansion of the Gaza fishing zone, and the opening of all crossings into Gaza, including the Refah crossing into Egypt. Like the Egyptian deal was to Hamas, these terms are unpalatable to Israel and will not be accepted. Unlike in 2012, when a ceasefire was brokered relatively easily and put an end to hostilities, this time around things are proving to be far more difficult, and it isn’t just a matter of Israel and Hamas meeting halfway.
For starters, there are no good brokers for a truce. The problems with Egypt are well-known; Sisi and the Egyptian government want to isolate Hamas, and Hamas does not trust Sisi any more than they trust Bibi Netanyahu. Egypt’s ceasefire deal was negotiated without any Hamas input or even prior notification to Hamas before the terms were made public, and was likely more of an effort on Egypt’s part to isolate and weaken Hamas even further by having the entire Arab League and Western countries line up behind a deal that Hamas was almost certainly going to reject rather than a true effort at brokering an end to fighting. At this point, it is difficult to envision a situation in which Egypt plays a role in mediating between the two sides. The U.S. cannot do it alone given that it has no ties to Hamas, and that leaves aside the reporting in Haaretz that Israel specifically asked Kerry to stay out of it to avoid the impression that the U.S. was pressuring Israel and thus granting Hamas a win. I wrote last week about the potential for Turkey and Qatar to step in so no need to rehash the variables there – and indeed Mahmoud Abbas and Meshal are meeting with President Gül and Prime Minister Erdoğan in Turkey on Friday – but both countries are deeply flawed due to their lack of successful experience in wading into Israeli-Palestinian fights, and Israel for good reason does not exactly trust either of them (particularly after Erdoğan yesterday compared Habayit Hayehudi MK Ayelet Shaked to Hitler).
Second, Hamas is an organization fractured between the Gaza leadership and the international leadership based in Qatar, and so it is unclear what it actually wants and who has the authority to make a deal. Signs point to Khaled Meshal following the military leaders right now than the other way around, and the military guys in Gaza appear to be averse to ending the fighting anytime soon. The atmosphere is very different now than it was in 2012, and while I will for the second time in a week emphasize that internal Palestinian politics are not my expertise, I have the sense that Meshal will be subject to the Gaza leadership’s veto on any deal he is involved in brokering. There is also the complicating factor of Gazans wanting a ceasefire and whether this will create any pressure on Hamas’s Gaza wing to at some point acquiesce.
Next, there is the fact that there is enormous political pressure on Bibi coming from his right flank to not accept any ceasefire – even one, like yesterday’s proposal, that is almost entirely on Israel’s terms – and to instead send the already-mobilized ground forces into Gaza. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday gave a press conference during which he advocated the IDF invading and retaking Gaza, and after Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon – who has long been a thorn in Netanyahu’s side within Likud – trashed Netanyahu for supporting the Egyptian ceasefire proposal, Netanyahu immediately fired him from his ministerial post. The ostensible reason was that it is unacceptable for a deputy defense minister to so harshly criticize the government’s defense policy in the midst of a war, but Netanyahu has been looking for ways to cut Danon down to size for awhile, and so he seized the opportunity once it presented itself. The larger point here is that Netanyahu has been isolated within his own party for some time as it moves further and further to the right, and his instinctual conservative behavior when it comes to sending troops into battle is not lauded by Likud members but is instead distrusted and viewed as weakness. I don’t think that Bibi wants to get involved in a ground war in Gaza, which entails lots of messy fighting, larger casualty numbers on both sides, guaranteed international opprobrium, and which last time led to the Goldstone Report following Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9. Nevertheless, the longer that rockets come flying from Gaza and the longer ground troops sit idly by waiting for orders, the more the rightwing is going to yell and howl about the need to take stronger military action rather than accepting a ceasefire deal that will only guarantee a few years of quiet at best.
There is also the factor of international support, and each side’s delusions about where it will lie as this drags further on. Israel made it very clear in the aftermath of the Hamas rejection of the Egyptian ceasefire that it views Hamas’s refusal to lay down arms as granting legitimacy to an eventual Israeli ground invasion, and the Israeli government believes that much of the world agrees with this position. I find it hard to believe that this logic will hold up in the face of mounting Palestinian deaths and a continued lopsided body count, even if the one-sided casualty numbers need to be viewed in the context of Hamas’s failure at killing Israelis not being for a lack of trying. It is also generally the case that world opinion does not work in Israel’s favor, and I do not think that structural feature is going to change as Operation Protective Edge continues. On Hamas’s side, it believes that world opinion will turn against Israel as things progress, which is in my view correct, and that the Israeli public will eventually get fed up and pressure Netanyahu to stop fighting, which in my view is comically incorrect. Furthermore, world opinion and international support are two different things, and at the moment Israel does not lack for support. In fact, yesterday Congress approved more funding for Iron Dome, and Hamas underestimates how much support in 2012 was driven by Arab countries that have since abandoned Hamas wholesale.
Finally, there is the balancing act that Israel is trying to play with the eventual outcome regarding Hamas itself. Israel’s goals are delicately balanced between weakening Hamas and taking out its capabilities to launch long-range missiles at Israeli cities while still keeping Hamas alive and viable to the point of it maintaining its rule over Gaza. Israel recognizes that while Hamas used to look like the most radical group in the neighborhood when compared to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, Hamas now routinely gets pressured from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other even scarier jihadi groups. That basic fact is what led Hamas to escalate things in the first place, as it has its own internal politics with which to contend. The Israeli government knows that until last week, Hamas has largely been trying to keep rockets from being launched out of Gaza rather than themselves doing the launching since the 2012 ceasefire, and it also knows that it is a pipe dream to hope for the PA to regain control of Gaza. Israel needs Hamas to run Gaza and keep it from spiraling even further out of control, so any ceasefire agreement that Israel signs will have to keep Hamas in power but assure Israel that Hamas’s military capabilities remain degraded following the fighting.
The upshot of all this is that Gaza in 2014 is a lot more complicated than Gaza in 2012, and assuming that the U.S. or Egypt can just swoop in and put an end to things when both sides have had enough is naive. There is lots of politics, both international and domestic, involved here, and while I still hold out hope of some combination of the U.S. and Turkey/Qatar being able to bridge the various gaps, the problem is that the gaps look more like chasms.
Wieseltier Is Right About The Lost Cause That Is The Peace Process
December 10, 2012 § 3 Comments
Leon Wieseltier has penned a eulogy for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in his lifetime, and while this is not going to surprise anyone save the most Pollyannaish dead-enders, it is difficult to conclude that he is wrong. I’ll take it even further and say that absent armed U.S. intervention with the purpose of imposing a solution on the two parties, or concurrent Israeli and Palestinian civil wars, it is unlikely to happen in my lifetime either (and Wieseltier has almost three decades on me). Wieseltier describes peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a lost cause, and he refers to a number of recent events that bolster his case – Hamas rockets, Mahmoud Abbas’s overheated rhetoric at the UN, the E1 settlement announcement, and the alliance between Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, among others. There is no doubt that the particulars of the last few years, or even the last few months, provide little reason for optimism, and Wieseltier recounts, “People assure me that all this can change if there is the political will to change it; but I do not detect the political will.” This is actually where I disagree with Wieseltier, because he frames the issue as a lack of will or courage, but I think it runs much deeper. We are rapidly getting to the point, if we have not passed it already, where structural conditions make a genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians impossible without an outside shock to the system, irrespective of who each side’s leaders are and whether they have the will of Rabin, Ghandi, and the Dalai Lama rolled into one.
Not only is the peace process stagnant, the situation is actually getting worse by the day rather than just cruising in a holding pattern. The reason for this is that each side’s position is hardening, but in different ways. On the Israeli side, the problem is literally a structural one, in that Israel is too intertwined in the West Bank to be able to exit it in any comprehensive manner. Let’s say the Israeli government struck a deal tomorrow and agreed to keep a few of the largest settlement blocs in return for proportional land swaps within Israel, and all that needed to be done was to evacuate the rest of the settlements (and to figure out the precise parameters of such a deal, check out this amazing new tool from the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and the Atlantic that lets you draw borders and see the precise implications in terms of population and percentage of the West Bank). There is just no way that the government could ever carry this out anymore. Gaza was a cakewalk compared to what will be when Israel orders settlers to pick up their stakes and move, and partially this is because the promises that Israel made to Gaza’s settlers on compensation and resettlement have gone unfulfilled. Just look at what happened with Migron, which is a tiny outpost, or the gnashing of teeth over settlers having to evacuate the neighborhood of Ulpana and literally move just down the street. The idea that Israel will be able to just pick up and leave when it finds a suitable negotiating partner on the other side would be a joke if people didn’t actually think it was true. Furthermore, the argument that Israel was able to pull out of Gaza or Yamit and so it will be able to pull out of the West Bank when push comes to shove is at this point hopelessly naive, as if those instances have any real bearing on the situation in the West Bank, or as if Israeli politics and public opinion can just be overcome with a government order to evacuate. This is not a question of political will in the near horizon, but one of whether a certain action can ever be accomplished under any circumstances. I hate to say that I don’t think it can, and trying to do so would ignite a full blown civil war in Israel, with settlers fighting the IDF tooth and nail and a significant portion of Israelis sympathizing with the settlers who were urged and incentivized by their government for decades to go put down roots in the West Bank.
On the Palestinian side, what is being hardened is not necessarily the physical situation on the ground but the ideological situation. For every poll showing a majority of Palestinians supporting peace negotiations there is a poll showing a majority rejecting a two state solution. More worrying than any specific poll is that Hamas now controls Gaza, is making inroads in the West Bank, and smart money is that ten years from now Hamas will be the face of the Palestinians rather than Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (unless Hamas comes to control the PA). Lest you think that Hamas’s views toward Israel and accepting Israel inside the 1967 borders are moderating, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal wants to make sure that you are aware that Hamas is as radical as ever, as he reiterated to hundreds of thousands of cheering Gazans over the weekend that Hamas will literally fight to the death until Israel is gone. In addition, the apparent decision on the part of Sunni states such as Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey to prop up Hamas and the trend of emerging Islamist governments in the region means that Hamas is only going to grow stronger and be seen as more legitimate, and it follows that the same will happen to its views on negotiating a real two-state solution. Make no mistake, this is even more of a problem – and one that is just as intractable – as the problem I highlighted on the Israeli side, and once again making the problem disappear probably requires a Palestinian civil war, in which a Palestinian Authority led by a committed two-stater like Salam Fayyad defeats Hamas in open warfare.
So, is Wieseltier’s recent essay a depressing one? It is, and not just because one man has decided that the peace process is an irrevocably lost cause. It is depressing because it might be even more of a lost cause than Wieseltier acknowledges, and from where I’m sitting, I don’t see a good way out of the morass absent some terrible infighting and bloodshed on both sides. Ehud Olmert might have convinced some people that all he needed was a few more months and everything would have been solved, but a more realistic assessment suggests otherwise. That doesn’t mean that anyone should stop trying to work toward a two-state solution but it is as much of an uphill battle as exists anywhere.
Israel Turns To Turkey’s Journalists
July 25, 2012 § 4 Comments
In what appears to be a new strategy to restore ties with Turkey, the Israeli government this week invited a group of Turkish journalists to Israel, where they first met with Avigdor Lieberman and then with Bibi Netanyahu. The thinking behind this is pretty straightforward; there has been little apparent progress so far in mending ties with Ankara, and so going past the Turkish government to Turkish journalists, who in turn will hopefully write about Israel in a favorable light, will create some momentum for a reconciliation.
This gambit, however, has initially had mixed results. First, there were conflicting reports in the Turkish press following the meeting with Lieberman over whether Israel was prepared to offer an apology for the Mavi Marmara. According to Hürriyet, Lieberman said that Israel is ready to talk to Turkey about any and all issues but is categorically unwilling to apologize, while Today’s Zaman report of the very same meeting quoted Lieberman as saying that Israel is willing to discuss an apology provided that it be included in discussions on a host of other issues. The confusion certainly did not help matters, and the Turkish Foreign Ministry reiterated its stance that it requires an apology and reparations from Israel and dismissed Israeli public diplomacy efforts as a failed end-run around the conditions laid out by Ankara for normalization of relations. Netanyahu’s meeting with the group of journalists seemed to go better, which is no surprise given that Lieberman is a particularly undiplomatic diplomat. Netanyahu met them in his national security council conference room and placed a Turkish flag next to the Israeli one, and expressed how important the relationship is with Turkey while reassuring his visitors that improved Israeli ties with Greece are not related to the deterioration in relations with Turkey.
In the meantime, none of this seems to be having the desired effect on the Turkish government. The AKP hosted an iftar dinner for the foreign diplomatic corps in Turkey, but the two countries not invited were Israel and Syria. That Israel is being lumped in with Syria, a regime that shot at and downed a Turkish fighter jet and that is busy massacring its citizens, is perhaps the biggest slap in the face that Ankara could give to Jerusalem. Then, Erdoğan held a smaller iftar dinner with Ahmet Davutoğlu and Hakan Fidan where he hosted Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal. Inviting Meshaal to a private meeting at the prime minister’s home with the prime minister and Turkey’s top foreign policy and intelligence officials is also not going to make Israel feel any more comfortable about where its relationship with Turkey is heading.
It is also unlikely that the PR offensive will move the Turkish public into clamoring for a restoration of full ties with Israel. Turks don’t see how the spat with Israel has cost them anything and are of the firm view that Israel needs Turkey far more than Turkey needs Israel. Writing in Hürriyet, Mehmet Ali Birand warned that the fallout from the flotilla has cost not only Israel influence in the region but Turkey as well and that no holistic Middle East policy can be undertaken while shutting Israel out, but I’m not sure that either average Turks or the Turkish government believe this to be the case. Turkey does not seem to think that the freeze with Israel is particularly costly, and the government has maintained its strategy of keeping pressure on Israel while Israel vainly tries to restore ties without meeting Ankara’s demands. The effort to woo journalists is nice in theory, but it is not going to accomplish much. Israel and Turkey were on the verge of patching things up last summer and then the agreement got scuttled when – depending on which reports are to be believed – either Netanyahu or Lieberman got cold feet at the last moment. The only way the situation will be resolved is on a government to government level, and whether the barrier is Lieberman’s inclusion in the coalition or Davutoğlu’s absolute refusal to even talk to his Israeli counterpart, Turkey needs to be convinced that its reputation and strategic interests are being damaged by this cold war while Israel needs to be convinced that it will have to take some genuine moves to restore ties and that the whole thing will not just blow over with time.
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.
