"Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that Hamas is doing all it can to torpedo the Mideast peace process -- but Ephraim Halevy, former head of Mossad, thinks it's time to include the Islamist group in peace talks. Who's right?" This is the question posted to panelists by PostGlobal.
I think that it is now too late to talk peace with Hamas. 2005 would have been good. 2006 would have been perfect. But not anymore. Not in 2007-2008.
One reason is that Hamas is no longer interested. When elected with a sweeping majority, the Gaza-based Hamas leadership was dying for international recognition -- not as guerrilla warriors but as statesmen. The same thing had happened back in 1974 to Yasser Arafat, where he went to the United Nations to market himself as both a peacemaker and war-maker, raising the famous, "I come to you carrying an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Don't let the olive branch fall from my hand."
Arafat never believed that sentence, not for a single moment. This is what he needed to say, however, to restore bits and pieces of Palestine. Arafat was fighting for a just cause, and sick and tired of being treated like an A-class terrorist by the international community. He knew he could never destroy Israel and return to the Palestine of 1948. He raised this slogan right after the War of 1967 to legitimize himself in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians, and then to negotiate something more reasonable with Israel. He couldn't do the latter without war medals: He needed to show the Israelis that the Palestinians existed, were under his leadership, and were willing to go to dramatic means to get themselves heard outside their own borders.
This is the period that produced the Karameh Battle of 1969, the Dawson Airfield hijackings of 1970, the Munich massacre of 1972, and the war of attrition through South Lebanon. Arafat succeeded in attaining getting recognition for the Palestinians and went on to the UN in 1974, but was unable to come across as a peacemaker until after the Madrid Peace Conference (to which he was not invited because of his support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War).
Much of the Arafat story applies to Hamas. When Arafat signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, many criticized his wisdom. But nobody in the Palestinian street questioned his nationalism. Nobody said that he was a traitor -- and with time, people accepted what Arafat had done out of helplessness rather than conviction. He would famously tell his aides, "See this hand? (while waving his right hand)...Only this hand can sign peace with the Israelis!" That became all the more clear after his death in 2004. Nobody in the Palestinian street had the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat except Hamas. They had fought, suffered, led, and preached the most for Palestine since their inception in the late 1980s.
Abu Mazen (current President Mahmud Abbas) had absolutely no war medals to boast of, just his signature on the much hated Oslo Accords. The same applied to then Prime Minister Ahmad Qurai (Abu Alaa) and other Fatah celebrities like Saeb Erekat, Nabil Shaath, and Yasser Abd Rabbo. The only Fatah heavyweights who had the legitimacy to talk and sign peace then get away with it were Marwan Barghouti (who was in jail) and Farouk Qaddumi (Abu al-Lutf), who was in exile in Tunis.
Hamas's leaders on the other hand were uncorrupted. They had an unblemished record (even finer than Arafat's when he went to Oslo). They had plenty of war medals.
At the time, there was the possibility of progress because Israel had its own heavyweight, Ariel Sharon, who also had plenty of war medals. Both he and Hamas had enough legitimacy to sign peace. Things changed when Sharon was incapacitated and replaced by Ehud Olmert, who made things all the more difficult by going to war-and not winning-in Lebanon in 2006.
Meanwhile, rather than engage with Hamas, the international community, headed by the US, isolated the Islamic movement. They failed to see that had Hamas signed or even talked peace back in 2006, then it would have produced a Palestinian resistance movement with no resistance. Earlier parties like the PFLP and DFLP are now history. Islamic Jihad is nowhere as influential or organized as Hamas. Fatah is ruined without Arafat.
All of this topped with a Hamas talking peace -- and thereby relinquishing its arms -- would have been in Israel's best interest. Government office for Hamas brought along with it responsibility to bring security and better services to the Palestinians. Government office also brought with it restrictions on what the ruling party could or could not do. It could no longer fire missiles into Israel. And for the first 10 months of Hamas's tenure, indeed not a single Hamas attack took place on the Jewish state.
The international community failed to realize that there were two schools within the Hamas command. One was headed by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya. This pragmatic school wanted to do what was needed to get a state up and running. If it meant recognizing the Israelis, then so be it. Haniyya realized that Hamas won the elections because it promised better security, better jobs, and higher wages. He promised to end the occupation, combat unemployment, offer better education, and pay higher wages in the civil service. He could do none of that while the Palestinians were in a state of war with Israel. He had too much luggage on his shoulders however, given his background and ideology, to come out and say, "I come to you carrying an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun." The Israelis and the Americans should have searched for a honorable formula for him to talk peace -- or make peace -- with maximal face-saving. He was willing to do so long as the Palestinian street did not perceive him as having said, "Uncle!"
On the other hand, there exists another school in Hamas, not based in Gaza, that calls for radicalization and refusal to recognize the Israelis. This school is headed by leaders like Khaled Meshaal. Haniyya lives in Gaza and realizes because of daily interaction how difficult it is for ordinary Palestinians. Meshaal lives far away -- in the comfort of Damascus and Doha -- making his understanding of the Palestinian street somewhat limited. Meshaal was not interested in running a state. He had a resistance to lead and wanted Hamas to concentrate on what it knew how to do best: waging war on Israel. Anything short of that would only divert the Islamic group's attention and waste its resources.
Israel should have favored people like Haniyya. Instead it preferred to deal with people like Meshaal, who justify hard-line policies. The Olmert government does not want peace with the Palestinians. But if they get a Palestinian prime minister who talks of nothing but peace every single day, this makes it difficult for them to turn a blind eye to him. Dealing with somebody like Meshaal is easier, more secure, and more familiar for the IDF.
After what happened in Gaza in 2007, nobody in Hamas can or would talk of a peace settlement with Israel. In addition to being no longer interested, they simply would be unable to push through with such a deal in the Palestinian street. Having been unable to provide jobs, food, or security, to their constituency, they no longer had the Arafat-like legitimacy that they enjoyed in 2005-2006.
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