Gaza, Israel, Hamas and the lost calm of operation cast lead.
Zuhur, Sherifa
A shadow has fallen over the new years of 1430 and 2009 from
Israel's air assault and ground invasion of Gaza, Operation Cast
Lead. Not that any aspect of the Palestinian experience has been easy or
well communicated to the global public, but it does seem that post-9/11
Western discourse on Arabs and Muslims has led to particularly biased
reporting of the conflict, a glib assumption by major networks that
their American viewers see the world just as Benjamin Netanyahu or
Michael Oren do. Comprehensive reportage was really impossible; the
Israelis barred journalists from Gaza, and the wildest sorts of
allegations are being made. Still, we have an idea of the human impact:
more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,300
wounded, compared to thirteen Israeli deaths (some by friendly fire), as
of January 18, 2008. The "why" of this latest adventure is
harder to fathom, unless Israel truly desires to remain in a state of
conflict, and for that conflict to worsen. This ought to be given
serious consideration; it is not for nothing that Israel has become an
exporter of weapons, security systems and "security training."
Moreover, most Israelis remain physically segregated from Palestinian
suffering and many maintain a comfortable and secure lifestyle that may
not be much of an incentive to peace. Others live far less comfortably,
travel by public transport but lack any sympathy for Palestinians, not
only due to their separation from or ignorance of them, but due to fear,
enlarged by the media.
Declarations like "Hamas has to be taught a lesson" belie the fact that Hamas is a movement located throughout the Palestinian
national body, just as Hizbollah represents large numbers of Shii
Muslims in Lebanon, and as an accepted political party, cannot be easily
extricated from the nation. Most curious are Tzipi Livni's
declarations of "success," which were implicitly, if subtly,
challenged by Fareed Zakaria and others who have questioned the real
military intent of reconquering Gaza. If by "successful" Livni
means that there will be an end to Hamas, she is wrong. To claim that
the goal is to reduce the numbers of rockets (which have killed very few
Israelis) fired into southern Israel from Gaza since long before Hamas
actually assumed political control of that area, is also clearly
nonsense. That is not the goal of a massive air and ground campaign. At
the very least, we can assume that there is no Israeli desire for peace
with the Palestinians.
If Livni, instead, means that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are
recouping some of the status lost in the summer of 2006, she is in
denial. The long-term effect of the sight of dead and wounded
Palestinian children and other civilians undermines the respect for life
that must be part of any solution that will bring true security to the
Israelis. I have recently spent several years studying Hamas as a
movement and the way that it paradoxically arose to challenge all of
Israel's assumptions, while transforming itself and gaining more
legitimacy, despite inter-Palestinian strife and harsh treatment by
Israel of the entire Palestinian population in an effort to punish or
tarnish Hamas. It seems all my insights were wrong. I thought it would
be far more logical for Israel to re-engage in a tahdiya (ceasefire)
with Hamas when the previous one ended, either officially on December
16, 2008, or when Israel had essentially cancelled it by launching
assassinations of Hamas leaders on November 5. The Israeli attack on
Gaza had clearly been planned a long time beforehand. The IDF hoped to
weaken Hamas at a time when they were certain of less international
interference and greater political benefit to Tzipi Livni's
government prior to the Israeli elections.
These have been the most severe attacks since 1967, and civilians
have been the primary victims. Opening fire on five people daring to
venture out to the market in Gaza City does not make the market a Hamas
missile launcher. The inane Israeli-Western claim that Hamas uses
"human shields" is just the opposite; Israel has for years
used Palestinians as human shields in its raids on civilians in their
homes. The deep cynicism and desperation produced by this small war, on
the heels of a protracted boycott and effort to starve out the
legitimately elected Hamas government, cannot produce a favorable
attitude toward Israeli authority or any other. One also sees that the
meaning of "occupation" is being forgotten or distorted in a
discourse that continues, falsely, to juxtapose Israel and Palestinian
power as if they were symmetrical. Indeed, they are not.
Hamas survived the air and ground war. It was not destroyed inside
or outside of Gaza. This large movement has a very strong presence in
the West Bank and has always, necessarily, maintained a presence in
Jordan and Syria. However, survival is probably not enough for Hamas to
fulfill its self-defined priority: to serve the Palestinian people and
help them end the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Neither sumud (steadfastness) nor jihad in a threatened third Intifada
are appropriate ways forward. Will rocket attacks cease? Will suicide
attacks increase? Probably some aspect of violent resistance will
continue until and unless a political resolution to the conflict is
reached. The current Israeli government has not demonstrated any desire
for such a solution.
When I wrote this essay, the media were still barred from Gaza so
as to prevent reporting of the situation on the ground. A foreign
journalist from within Gaza reported on the incredibly fearful state of
Palestinians, the lack of medical treatment, and the sense that the
Israelis simply intended to inflict whatever harm was possible. Since
Israel possesses the technology to hit missile launchers with accuracy,
the ill intent towards all Gazans is obvious. At least 500,000
Palestinians have been displaced, and more than 4,000 buildings were
destroyed. The enormous damage to infrastructure included mosques,
government buildings, the Islamic University (where the Israelis'
astoundingly false claim is that weapons were being manufactured), the
police station, residential buildings, fuel-oil facilities and so on.
Here we can note a trend: overwhelming military force has been used to
destroy infrastructure and inflict collective punishment in this
campaign, in the 2006 war on Lebanon (it was not merely a war on
Hezbollah), and in the 2002 campaign that flattened Ramallah, Jenin and
other parts of the West Bank. The conclusion to be drawn is that the
Israeli military wish to destroy any basis for a Palestinian state.
Moving away from the issue of manipulation of the discourse over
the conflict, let us examine Israeli strategy against Hamas. It is,
after all, just one aspect of Israel's Arab policies. Neither
Israel nor the Palestinians have a unified position towards the other,
and neither has a monolithic view of Hamas. Each group is socialized
through families, neighborhoods, educational systems and employment
experiences. And for Israelis, there is also the military. According to Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, Israelis had an image of
themselves as a unified society formed under an earlier
self-sacrificing, land-working Zionist vision. This false image has been
replaced by seven cultures, all of which have been affected by the
increasing role of religion and militarism: the Ashkenazi upper middle
class, the national religious, the traditionalist mizrahim, the
"Arabs" (Palestinians), the Orthodox religious, the new
Russian immigrants and the Ethiopian immigrants. (1) A cultural code of
Jewishness, for the devout or not-so-devout, and a nonsecular system are
the only commonalities of six of these, who now believe in the civil
religion of security, in which the non-military are subordinated to the
military. Three different orientations towards the Arab and Muslim enemy
pertain: the securitist, the conflict-oriented and the
compromise-oriented. (2)
The securitist view is that Israel would be doomed by a major
military defeat and that the state owes the Israeli people security from
this fate. Both war and peacemaking are functions belonging to the
military, according to this way of thinking. The conflict-oriented aim
to retain as much land as possible of historic/Biblical Israel for moral
and religious reasons and not just security. These groups include those
who want the complete elimination of a Palestinian threat, whether by
permanent conquest and deportation, relocation or other dispersal of
Palestinians living where, in their view, Jews should live. But
securitists also include those who can conceive of a Palestinian
Authority (PA) that, completely cowed, somehow accepts Israel's
security "needs." Securitists and the conflict-oriented use
the term "security" to refer to demographic challenge as much
as violence. Compromise-oriented Israelis believe that a peace that
ensures Israel acceptance in the region would provide security. Hence,
Israel's desired end state--free of enemies, free of non-Jews,
democratic yet hal--c (following Jewish law)--is all but unachievable
and is fiercely disputed among the three security orientations that cut
across its polyglot culture. Of the three, the compromise-oriented are
most willing to engage in dialogue with Hamas.
Israeli security culture, in a population where all serve in the
military, is not exactly like that in the United States, nor like the
Palestinian "security culture" forged under occupation and
without sovereignty. When the United States seemingly borrows from
Israeli military and counterterrorist policies, as it has been accused
of doing in Iraq, (3) there are certain qualitatively different
assumptions that hold, even if the defensive framework (a defense
against global terror) takes shape in policies that break with, for
instance, the notion of "purity of arms" or not attacking
civilians. (4) Mira Sucharov has shown how Israel has developed a
defensive security ethic (part of its security culture) but continuously
pursued an offensive security doctrine. (5) This paradox makes it easier
to comprehend Hamas' intention of defending Muslims through jihad,
if necessary.
Hamas's goal is the liberation of Palestine. It is not, as is
often claimed, the destruction of the Jews. Yes, its "frame of
reference" is Islam. (6) However, Hamas is unlike the salafist or
al-Qaedist groups that have burgeoned since 9/11. The goal of seeking a
more Islamic society is subordinate to Hamas's nationalist or
political agenda. Its leaders have differentiated the fostering of an
Islamic society from the goal of an Islamic state, (7) since they want
to represent the aims of the Palestinian people. And the liberation
referred to, says Naser al-Din al-Shaer, former PA deputy prime minister and minister of education (under the Hamas government), is from a
"real occupation of 60 years," unlike what we have witnessed
in Iraq, which most consider to be a temporary phase. (8)
"Occupation" is a verifiable legal status that applies to the
West Bank and Gaza. It is a question of denial of political and human
rights. It is not a slogan, as the Israeli ambassador to the United
States has asserted. If Israel can reoccupy Gaza at will and in a
day's time, then its withdrawal was meaningless. It was all for
public consumption.
Palestinian society is a composite, divided between those who
remained in their original homes and refugees, including those who have
had to flee multiple times. The refugees living outside of the West Bank
and Syria comprise a very large number people. They have supported both
armed conflict and negotiation and live in varying circumstances. They
are treated as citizens in Jordan, but not in Lebanon or Syria. Hamas
has refused to exclude them from the Palestinian issue, despite pressure
from Israel. Even Israelis who consider themselves liberal and who
participated in the Oslo-era "dialoguing" laughed at
Palestinians' insistence on discussing the right of return or
reparations, once again revealing the effects of a long-standing power
asymmetry and the socialization of dominance. (9) Within Gaza and the
West Bank, public opinion has been affected by the presence of refugee
camps and the developmental needs of Palestinian society as well as the
great failure of Oslo and political divisions such as the split within
Fatah between those returning from Tunis and those living in the
occupied territories who came of age during the first Intifada. While no
political entity could be highly effective, Hamas has at least seemed to
many people to have the cleaner hands and to have been more committed to
fighting for the rights of ordinary Palestinians.
As with Israelis, each sector of society--professionals, workers,
refugees, students, members of the historical elites, and unemployed or
underemployed youth--are divided in their views about their experience
and future. Individuals' life histories reveal that many of the
young men involved in militance since the second Intifada are torn
between what they see as the primacy of the conflict and the normal
desire for stability and family life. (10) Young and old are under
constant pressure and must endure a continuous succession of
emergencies--detentions, prison sentences, loss of employment,
destruction of their homes, or other such events that impact their
family members. These are not simply the existential threat impressed on
Israelis in high school and military training. (11) Many Palestinians
are traumatized and fear leaving their homes; every family has been
impacted by the huge numbers of men imprisoned.
Hamas's social services have attempted to fill gaps for over
20 years, dating back to the organization's infancy. As the
Israelis exploited the rift between Fatah and Hamas, social-service
needs changed. For instance, Hamas provided aid to numerous families of
prisoners during the chaotic and corrupt 2004-05 period because women
family members were severely harassed when they came to collect prisoner
stipends from Palestinian Authority officials. After the PA took over
Hamas agencies, schools and services in the West Bank last summer,
ordinary people decried the non-functioning of these services, because
the Islamist movement had run effective and qualified programs.
Among Palestinians and Hamas are those who hold out hope for a
political solution and hard-liners who think that militaristic Israel
can only understand force. They include professionals and others who
have tried to use the new global connectivity--the media, the internet,
messaging--to their advantage and some who used to believe in
negotiation but were worn down by the endless cycles of negotiating and
dialoguing that seem never to erode Israeli inflexibility and paranoia
and the never-ending waves of Israeli violence against Palestinians. For
Palestinians, their Arab, Muslim and Palestinian identities all carry
negative weight and instant stereotyping in any interaction with Israel,
no matter how small: making a phone call, paying a bill, moving through
a checkpoint, driving to the airport. The Arab and Palestinian parts of
their identities were recovered and honored through political activism.
Hamas has allowed them to express their Muslim identity as well.
Hamas's Islamist orientation responds to the challenges
Palestinians face as Muslims. Israeli policies were designed to uncouple
nationalist and Muslim sentiments. Palestinians as a whole lost control
in 1948 over their system of religious education and the appointment of
clerics, which fell to Israel, Egypt and Jordan. (12) They could not
visit numerous holy places, mosques and tombs, many of which, like the
mosque of Beersheva, remain closed. Palestinians in one area are blocked
from travel to another, preventing visits to religious sites or persons.
Meanwhile, Islam is taught by Israelis in an Orientalist tradition, and
Islam's traditionalism, recalcitrance to modernity, and exotic and
violent features are emphasized.
Palestinians have historically faced obstacles in performing the
hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, one of the five basic requirements of
Muslims. In 2002, Israel prevented all Palestinians under 35 from going
on hajj. In November 2003, a large number of Palestinians (including
women and elderly persons) were denied permission to go on the umrah (the lesser pilgrimage) during Ramadan. In August 2007, 3,000 pilgrims
were stranded at the crossing into Egypt. In late December 2007, over
1,000 people were denied entrance back into Gaza from Egypt. Egypt had
allowed them into its territory to perform hajj, but Israel had closed
the border to punish Hamas and, despite its promotion of Mahmoud Abbas,
gave him no authority to solve the problem. This created a diplomatic
dilemma for Egypt; Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni authorized the
arrests of Hamas pilgrims and took Egyptians to task (13) for not
"dealing with" the Gazan-Egyptian tunnels. Israel also
required Egypt to put more pressure on Hamas regarding the captured
Israeli Gilad Shalit and other issues.
Being outside the fractious pro- and anti-Arafatist struggle within
the PLO, and the conflicts among Fatah's factions and its corrupt
aspects, also lent credence to Hamas. Its leaders have earned their
reputation for decency, practicality and hard work in public service.
RECOGNITION
It is frequently stated that neither Israel nor the United States
can meet with Hamas (although meeting is not illegal; materially aiding
terrorism is, if proven) because the latter will not
"recognize" Israel. In contrast, the PLO has recognized
Israel's right to exist and agreed in principle to bargain for
significantly less land than the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, while
it is not clear that Israel has ever agreed to accept a Palestinian
state. The recognition of Israel did not bring an end to violence; wings
of various factions of the PLO have fought Israelis, especially at the
height of the second (al-Aqsa) Intifada.
Recognition of Israel by Hamas, in the way that it is described in
the Western media, cannot serve as a formula for peace. Hamas moderates
have, however, signaled that the organization implicitly recognizes
Israel, and that even a tahdiya (a calming, minor truce) or a hudna (a
longer-term truce) obviously implied recognition. (14) Khalid Mishal
states, "We are realists" and there "is an entity called
Israel," but "realism does not mean that you have to recognize
the legitimacy of the occupation." (15)
Therefore, when Western telepersonalities claim, "No ceasefire
can be called until Hamas 'recognizes' Israel and stops firing
rockets," this matter is fraught with tension for Hamas. This
tension came to the fore when observers interpreted Hamas's
participation and signing of the so-called Prisoners' Document
(National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners) in 2006 (second
version, June 28), (16) which suggests just this implicit interpretation
of recognition of Israel. Due to that popular perception, Hamas removed
its signature. However, the document has been the basis of various sets
of negotiations, such as the 2006 initiative of Qatar's ruler,
Shaikh Hamad, to heal inter-Palestinian rifts.
TWO STATES
Hamas has come to accept a two-state vision, even with the
contradiction in terms between this aim and the rights to historic
Palestine. However, it may be that the Israeli government is now
signaling that it rejects the two-state solution or will never grant the
powers of a "state" to a Palestinian "entity."
Mishal was asked by Al-Hayat in 2006:
Q: Do you accept a solution based on two states, an Israeli and a
Palestinian, according to President George Bush's vision?
Mishal: As a Palestinian, I am concerned with the establishment of
a Palestinian state and not concerned with the occupation state. Why is
the Palestinian being asked and the establishment of two states becomes
one of his objectives and principles? The Zionist state exists. I am
talking about my absent Palestinian state. I was the one deprived of my
state, sovereignty, independence, freedom and self-determination.
Therefore we ought to concentrate on how to achieve our rights. I am
concerned with the establishment of my state.
Q: Do you agree with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah's remarks:
"A Palestinian state within the 1967 territories and a truce?"
Mishal: This is a stand in the movement, and it was adopted inside
it. The movement accepts a state within the 1967 borders and a truce.
(17)
TACTICS
Hamas has not admitted excesses in attacks, particularly suicide
attacks on civilians, but it takes the defensive when discussing this
issue, even when the "martyrs" are not Hamas members.
Hamas's use of violence and its potential relinquishing of violence
are best analyzed at the level of the group or social movement, rather
than at the level of the individual. Hamas has consistently declared
that it would avenge the Palestinian people, particularly Israeli
attacks on civilians. It has, however, stayed its hand during particular
periods. What most concerned Israelis were suicide attacks and not
rockets fired at Sderot. We must ask, what changed? Hamas moved beyond
the frequent use of suicide attacks and entered into a tahdiya in the
hope of being permitted to govern in Gaza. They were not able to, as the
Israelis continued their boycott of that area. However, the Israelis
could not claim that suicide attacks motivated the recent war on Gaza;
instead, rocket fire, inaccurate and far less threatening than the
Israeli response, has had to suffice. Why would Hamas allow the rocket
fire to continue? Or is the proper question, why was this Hamas's
only violent response?
FORCE, VIOLENCE AND AUTHORITY
When the Israelis call for "teaching Hamas a lesson,"
what they really mean is that they wish to maintain authority through
the threat of violence, even over a territory with only fictive autonomy. Unfortunately, one of the effects of Israeli authority and
occupation has been to encourage the violence of Palestinians towards
each other. This has to be overcome before there can be a viable
solution, though it is not a precondition to some type of negotiation
with Israel. Hamas has been, in many cases, less politically coercive or
violent than Fatah, at least in internal matters, although it has gone
after collaborators and criminals. (18)
Hamas did, however, confront Fatah when the latter, or at least a
force within it, planned to fight Hamas in Gaza. Then it engaged in
low-level violence against Fatah elements, whose complaints were
prominently featured in the Israeli media, along with false reports that
Hamas was about to impose Islamic penal codes. (19) Hamas's
strength in the West Bank is a complicated matter. Prudently holding
back from violence, Hamas and ordinary Palestinians faced PA security
arrests and detentions "for half the night and Israeli
'security' for the other half of the night" under the
Fayyad-Abbas administration. (20) Hamas had to deal with the dismantling
of its educational and social initiatives over all the West Bank for a
year and a half after it began its struggle to govern in Gaza. Citizens
of West Bank towns were not only arrested on a nightly basis by the IDF
and Fatah-allied PA security officers, but many were tortured and
mistreated. (21) In just one week, Israel made 38 military raids or
incursions into the West Bank, killing a child, wounding two others, and
abducting 48 civilians without charge, some of them juveniles. This
included a raid into al-Fara refugee camp, in response to children
demonstrating at the funeral of the child killed, and a demonstration
against the separation wall at Bilin. (22) Among those tortured in PA
custody was a 67-year-old man who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage from a severe beating. (23) PA officers raided and closed the Islamic
schools and charities, including one with 1,000 students, in Nablus,
Hebron and Jenin, towns that have large concentrations of Hamas
supporters. Their institutional boards were reconstituted with Fatah
members. This is widely regarded as the PA's effort to follow
Israeli (and American) directions to root out Hamas's
social-support structure. Some 2,000 persons were arrested. While this
was perhaps a typical week in the West Bank, it was matched by weeks of
Israeli actions, assassinations and the complete cut-off of salaries,
oil, energy and food to Gaza. In Gaza, Hamas faced organizations founded
on strong Gaza clans. (24) These have been a source of salafist
militance in Gaza and of several kidnappings.
As all this violence was intended to pry Palestinian factions
apart, it would be ironic if Israel's iron fist brought them closer
together--unlikely, perhaps, given the financial and political
investments Israel has made, but it is a possibility.
HAMAS AND ARAB POLITICAL CURRENTS
Hamas emerged from the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), a broader
movement that had garnered a great deal of support by championing the
Palestinian cause and fighting in 1948 against Israel. But later, as the
Ikhwan of Palestine turned towards missionary activity and away from
armed resistance, it was the militant PLO that captured popular
imagination and allegiance. Therefore, it was the PLO whose leaders were
anathema.
Hamas inverted the Ikhwan's survival equation, asserting that
the liberation of Palestine is an essential task for the ummah (Muslim
community), that rather than waiting for an Islamic society, liberating
Palestine will bring about an Islamic way of life. Through this
evolution, a certain amount of inter-Ikhwan and Ikhwan-Hamas tension
emerged, especially in Jordan. These were reawakened when Jordan entered
into a peace agreement with Israel.
Hamas's relations vis-a-vis the Palestinian secular
nationalist movements also emerge from a complex history. The PLO was
eventually composed of three "progressive" groups: the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Communist Party, along with
the much larger Fatah organization. Since all of Fatah's founders
except Yasser Arafat had been members of the Ikhwan, Islamism was
reflected in Fatah and appears in some of the discourse of the al-Aqsa
Brigades, which emerged from it and were recently "reformed,"
giving up their jihad, even in Jenin.
Israel's decision to counter the results of the 2006
Palestinian election--boycotting Hamas, withholding funds to the PA and
encouraging Mahmud Abbas to create his own non-elected government--meant
that it was throwing its weight behind a "secular nationalist"
movement as opposed to an Islamist nationalist movement that would not
recognize Israel in the manner it demanded. However, the real issue is
not secularism versus Islamism. After all, Israel denied recognition to
the PLO for years, treating it as a terrorist movement. The real issue
has to do with who can channel popular resistance to Israel and justify
it.
The fundamentally altered relationship between the strong Israel
and the weak PA is part of this background, given the PA's
acceptance of negotiations and recognition of Israel through the Oslo
process, which Israel thought had solved its "internal Arab"
dilemma. That change was threatened by both intifadas and also by Hamas.
The transition of llamas from violence to political participation to a
quest for negotiation demonstrates a similar pattern. Since Oslo was a
huge compromise for the Palestinians that delivered little, Hamas held
back from recognizing Israel. It had very specific reasons: the
realities of the occupation, the huge number of political prisoners, a
need to decrease Israeli violence against Palestinians, and
Israel's practice of assassinating Hamas leaders. Yet it eventually
moderated its stance on truces, political participation and the
potential for negotiating with Israel on the grounds that it must
represent Palestinian popular will, the will of its constituents. This
is not simply an assertion; Khalid Hroub's and Azzam Tamimi's
work reveals the many changes in Hamas's stances. (25) Earlier on,
it seemed that Palestinians were deeply affected by the desperation of
the al-Aqsa Intifada. Then, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research (PSR) polls showed that nearly half (48 percent) of Hamas
followers supported the Roadmap propositions (26) and especially Crown
Prince (now King) Abdullah's peace initiative in 2002. This was
true even considering the range of opinion in which students and
professionals have been more "radical" (militant) than other
Hamas followers. (27)
RECOMMENDATIONS
All this potential movement toward a more moderate stance has been
squandered by Israel in order to "teach Hamas a lesson." In
2008, I made some recommendations based on the understanding that
Israel's policies have incited Hamas's militance and vice
versa. It might be useful to revisit these points in light of what
Israel has "achieved" in reconquering Gaza:
* Israel and the United States should let Hamas fulfill its
electoral promise to the Palestinians. The International Crisis Group
recommended in summer 2006 that Hamas be allowed to govern, that it
cease hostilities against Israel, and that the boycott be ended, (28) as
it has caused terrible hardship for Palestinians. (29) The boycott was
supposed to have ceased with the tahdiya. If it had, circumstances might
have been much improved in Gaza.
* The tahdiya that began on June 19, 2008, could have been extended
through diplomatic efforts. Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian minister of the
interior, negotiated with Hamas in an effort to include features
demanded by Israel. Hamas wants Israel to cease military strikes and
incursions into Gaza; Israel wants rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into
towns like Sderot to cease (30) and added new requirements aimed to
deter weapons acquisition in Gaza. Hamas needs to show the Palestinians
evidence of substantial positive movement by Israel towards granting
sovereignty, prisoner releases or other concrete benefits of the truce.
U.S. policy makers should strongly support the use of a renewed truce
for negotiations, as international obligations should not "be
undertaken symbolically to rally support for an idea without furthering
its attainment." (31)
Sadly, it seems that the U.S. peace effort embarked on late in
Bush's presidency was exactly what the National Security Strategy
of 2007 said it should not be: "symbolic" or even deceptive. A
new tahdiya is absolutely necessary, and the same requirements of each
side still pertain.
* Hamas did not capture Corporal Gilad Shalit but acquired custody
of him. This should alert both the international and U.S. defense
audiences to the presence of far less controlled and more extreme
entities than Hamas, who might well create chaos in its absence. While
Hamas held out in late September 2008 for a more significant prisoner
exchange, it clearly aimed to redress the damage to its capabilities and
call attention to the situation of a symbolically substantial number of
prisoners. While some Americans have criticized the Israelis for
negotiating for hostages, Yoram Schweitzer alluded to Israel's
counter-aim of proving to its citizens that it will not fail in efforts
to rescue them, (32) given the military-service needs of the state.
Similarly, joint doctrine holds that diplomatic means, including
negotiations, treaties or truces, are possible ways to recover
personnel. (33) The Hamas position is that the more than 11,000
Palestinian prisoners are, in essence, hostages. However, it must
prevent its members and other groups from future hostage taking. This
tactic, like suicide attacks, might continue. Hence, U.S. policy makers
or representatives acting in concert with Arab and European allies
should do everything in their power to discourage its use by
Palestinians, and not only Hamas, while convincing Israelis to release
prisoners, particularly political prisoners.
At the time of this writing, it is unclear if the invasion of Gaza
will result in the release of Gilad Shalit, although it is a
possibility. However, it remains certain that Palestinian political
prisoners should be released. Peace towards Israel cannot be concluded
with a captive population.
* Israel and the United States need to abandon their policies of
non-negotiation and non-communication with Hamas in favor of a much more
vigorous and sustained political process of long-term negotiation that
deals comprehensively with the Arab Israeli conflict and is not merely
another separate peace. It may take several years to complete, but this
is decidedly preferable to the enormous social and economic costs of
militaristic group politics that have burdened the Middle East for six
decades. The invasion and attacks against Gaza might mean Israeli
exclusion of Hamas would continue, however.
* U.S. policy makers and senior Department of Defense officials
should note the lessons in the Palestinian-Israeli example as well as
the analytical failures of Israeli and Palestinian leadership. It is
wrong to summarily replicate the Israeli strategy of seizing territories
and enclaves and defending perimeters in other contexts, namely Iraq.
Such "clear and hold" policies may appear to work in the short
term but will never produce the true security needed for nation
building. Israel has asserted its authority over and oppressed a people
whose will to resist could not be quelled, no matter what military,
counterterrorist or collaborator-buying actions were pursued, as these
actions lacked legitimacy. The actions against Gaza appear to verify
this observation.
In the Arab-Israeli wars, Chaim Herzog characterized Israel as
having a "civilian army" with inspired leaders in its first
two wars (David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan), who "out-generaled"
the Arabs, utilizing the indirect approach, improvisation and
flexibility. He acknowledged the IDF's resulting overconfidence and
Egypt's brilliant use of deception in the 1973 War. But Herzog
completely underestimated the Palestinian people in his summary of the
insubstantial threat posed by the PLO, (34) missing the very lesson that
was oblivious to the French in Algeria and which another Israeli leader,
Ariel Sharon, vowed to get right. Characterizing popular resistance
merely as terrorism or a "long war," (35) and facing it down
with counterterrorist and barrier-based measures will never succeed in
the long run. Locking up the Palestinians in their enclaves will only
lead to future outbursts of popular resistance. This strategy has not
protected the Israeli enclaves, just as no Green Zone or cordon
sanitaire can expect to be indefinitely secure.
* Instead the EU, the United States, Russia and the United Nations should aid the conflicting parties in devising a new approach (36) to
negotiations. Rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with the United
States in postponing negotiations, the world's diplomatic practice
needs ample revision, so that the third Intifada and the seventh
Arab-Israeli war need never be fought. The benefits of abandoning
silence, boycotts and secret coups would extend beyond the Arab-Israeli
conflict to the issue of nuclear weapons and Iran and other
rapprochements necessary to win the war on terror.
For unclear reasons, the rest of the world, including the United
Nations, was unable to convince the United States that cessation of the
Gaza campaign was warranted or necessary. Without pressure, apparently,
Israel will not amend its course. One could ask why punitive measures
were taken against Iraq in its aggression against Kuwait or Iran in its
determination to continue producing uranium, but no actions have been
taken against Israel. Discussion of boycotts, divestment and sanctions
against Israel is mounting. Complaints on the international legal front
have been lodged. It is not clear yet where these will lead.
* Moderates on both sides must be strengthened, but not under the
selective and factionalizing methods recommended by the Quartet and
Israel to date. Instead of just one specific final-solution-oriented
peace process, a variety of forums must be opened between Israelis and
Palestinians, including Hamas, with direct and indirect components that
tap into dialogues held in neutral locations so that, when negotiations
are well underway, peacemaking, state-building and economic plans can
also be actualized. This is more necessary than ever following Operation
Cast Lead.
* The parties could consider the internationalization of Jerusalem,
with specific reference to the holy places. The Palestinian and Israeli
positions are far apart on the issue, but it is worth noting that in
terms of international law, East Jerusalem was a part of the West Bank
until its conquest and occupation in June 1967 under the Regulations of
the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, Articles 42 and 43; the Fourth
Geneva Convention of 1949, Articles 1 and 2 (which Israel ratified in
1951); the First Protocol of 1977, Part 1; and UN resolutions 2253 and
2254 and Security Council Resolution 252, which treats Israel's
unification of Jerusalem as an illegal act. (37) This is the reason that
other nations do not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and
instead locate their embassies in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem and its
appropriation as Israeli property should not be forgotten, even with
attention elsewhere.
* Jerusalem may be a more emotional issue than the matter of
Palestinian refugees--except to the Palestinians, their refugees and
their descendents. Hamas's position is that they must be considered
and offered rights of return, as these rights are possessed by all Jews
in the world today. Hamas's officials have added, as do others,
that it is very likely that not many would return, and that a phased
process granting a set number per year could be established, thereby
alleviating certain other longstanding situations in Lebanon and Syria,
for example. A related solution is reparations for refugees, or both.
These issues cannot be dealt with immediately, but should not be put
off, as in the Oslo process, or ignored or denigrated by Israelis to the
extent that Palestinians lose trust in the other side.
* Essential to the resolution of the crisis is dismantling the
settlements in the West Bank and ending the corporate seizures and
Israeli use of land in the Jordan Valley. This actually carves off a
huge section of the West Bank.
Gaza is home to 1.5 million Palestinians. It cannot be reduced in
size any further. The need to connect it to the West Bank as well as
deal with settlements and land-development schemes there are all part of
the political negotiations that must be concluded in order to end the
cycle of violence.
* The solution to the armed-fighter presence in Palestinian society
is to absorb Hamas like other groups within the Palestinian security
apparatus, but that rests on the formation of a national-unity
government to heal the Hamas-Fatah rift, as the Saudi government had
attempted in Mecca. The dissolution of the al-Aqsa Brigades in the West
Bank shows this can be done, even though there were serious riffs
between Fatah itself and the brigades.
In its adventure in Gaza, Israeli has applied economic,
informational, military and diplomatic tools of power to defeat the
Palestinians (for example, its "diplomacy" extends through its
relationship with the United States to Arab countries like Egypt). And
yet, with all of these tools at its disposal, has Israel effectively
removed Hamas from power in Gaza? No. If it crushes the Gaza Strip into
bombed-out submission and arrests every male Palestinian, will it
effectively have destroyed Hamas? Again, the answer is no. Among the
more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners today, many are Hamas
members--and many more will be in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.
(1) Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of
Israeliness." State, Society, and the Military (University of
California Press), p. 2; for an extended version of this discussion, see
Sherifa Zuhur, Hamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based
Politics', (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2008-09),
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=894.
(2) Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness, Chapters
6 and pp. 173-228.
(3) Steve Niva, "The 'Israelization' of U.S.
Military Doctrine and Tactics: How the U.S. is Reproducing Israel's
Flawed Occupation Strategies in Iraq," Foreign Policy in Focus,
April 21, 2008.
(4) See Mira Sucharov, "Security Ethics and the Modern
Military: The Case of the Israeli Defense Forces," Armed Forces
& Society, Vol. 31, No. 169, Autumn 2005.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Hamas Political Bureau, "The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)," 2000.
(7) "Interview with Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Zahar: 'We
Will Try to Form an Islamic Society'," Spiegel Online
International, June 22, 2007, www.spiegel.de/international/world/O,
1518, 490160, O0.html.
(8) Personal interview, Ramallah, August 2007; and repeated in
interview, Nablus, August 2008.
(9) Personal interviews, Beersheva, Sderot, Mabu'im, other
southern towns, 2001-02.
(10) Laititia Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation
and the Intifada Generation (Princeton University Press, 2006).
(11) John Collins, Occupied by Memory: The Intifada and the
Palestinian State of Emergency (New York University, 2004); also
personal interviews carried out with fighters hiding from PA forces,
Ramallah, July 2005.
(12) While detailing the situation for Palestinians inside of
Israel, for an understanding of the issue, and Israeli troops toward
Islam, see Alisa Rubin Peled, Debating Islam in the Jewish State: The
Development of Policy Toward Islamic Institutions in Israel (State
University of New York Press, 2001).
(13) Mohammad Salah, "Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas
and the Hajj Pilgrims," al-Hayat, February 1, 2008.
(14) Personal interviews, 2005-07.
(15) Ibrahim Humaydi, interviewing Khalid Mishal, Damascus, October
10, 2006, published in al-Hayat, October 12, 2006.
(16) "Full Text of the National Conciliation Document of the
Prisoners, June 28, 2006," Jerusalem Media and Communication
Centre, www.jmc.org/documents/prisoners2.htm.
(17) Al-Hayat, October 12, 2006.
(18) Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics." Democracy, Religion,
Violence (Hurst and Company, 2007), p. 129.
(19) This interesting fiction appears in numerous sources; for
details, see Abu Aardvark, Marc Lynch's blog.
(20) Personal interviews, August 2008.
(21) Khaled Amayreh, "PA Torments Palestinians on
Israel's Behalf," Palestinian Information Center, July 31,
2008.
(22) PCHR Weekly Report, July 31-August 6,
www.imemc.org/article/56429.
(23) Personal interview with Naser El-Din Shaer, August 11, 2008.
(24) International Crisis Group, "Inside Gaza: The Challenge
of Clans and Families," Middle East Report, No. 71, December 20,
2007.
(25) Khalid Hroub, Hamas: ,4 Beginner's Guide (Pluto Press,
2006); Hroub, "Hamas's Path to Reinvention," Open
Democracy, October 10, 2006; Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and
Practice (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000); Azzam Tamimi, Hamas: A
History From Within (Interlink, 2007).
(26) PSR Public Opinion polls given in Gunning, p. 228. PSR is the
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
(27) Ibid, p. 229.
(28) Gareth Evens and Robert Malley, "How to Curb the Tension
in Gaza," Financial Times, July 6, 2006. Similar views to those
expressed by William Arkin, August 7, 2006,
blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/08/
let_hezbollah_and_Hamas_govern.html, were found throughout the Middle
Eastern press.
(29) Sherifa Zuhur, Hamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of
Group-Based Politics (U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, 2008),
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/Pubs/Display.Cfm?pubID=894
and 2009, print.
(30) The New York Times, June 18, 2008.
(31) National Security Strategy, 2002; and Multinational
Operations, Additional Doctrine, JP pp. 3-16.
(32) In reference to the Hizbullah-Israeli exchange, Yoram
Schweitzer, "Not That Bad a Deal." Jerusalem Post, July 23,
2008.
(33) Joint Publication 3-50, pp. 1-3.
(34) Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the
Middle East from the War of Independence through Lebanon (Random House,
1982), pp. 362-368.
(35) As in the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2006. Other than the
targeting of terrorist networks, and recommendations for Iraq and
Afghanistan, the QDR just speaks of the same "indirect
approach" mentioned by Herzog, interestingly utilizing the example
of Allenby's attack on Aqaba. Granted, the term "long
war" was relinquished within U.S. Central Command, but persists as
a concept elsewhere.
(36) As the International Crisis Group had earlier urged as well,
"Israel/Palestine/Lebanon: Climbing Out of the Abyss," Middle
East Report, No. 57, July 25, 2006.
(37) Ibrahim M. Sha'ban, "Jerusalem in Public
International Law," Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics
and Culture, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007, pp. 43-44.
Dr. Zuhur, the author of llamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies
of Group-Based Politics (Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College,
2009), is director of the Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic and
Diasporic Studies.