Source: Al-Hayat
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal mounted the podium in Gaza City on December 8 to address a rally marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the movement’s founding and spoke without fear of assassination by Israel. By so doing, he seemed to vindicate his organization’s claims of victory in a confrontation with the Israelis that ended only seventeen days earlier. Meshaal’s speech reflected this confidence, and he came across as a claimant to leadership of a nation, not just to that of Hamas or Gaza.
Hamas believes that it is ascendant while Fatah, the nationalist movement that has dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since 1969 and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 1994, is on an irreversible decline. But despite its triumphant mood, Hamas faces the same strategic challenges and options that the PLO did under Yasser Arafat from the 1970s onward. And despite Meshaal’s maximalist tone in much of his speech, he provided evidence that Hamas is responding to these challenges by following a path taken previously by the PLO.
At first glance, the differences seem greater than the similarities. When Arafat moved to Gaza eighteen years ago, on July 4, 1994, traveling literally along the same route Meshaal took, he did so after exchanging letters of recognition and concluding the “Gaza-Jericho” agreement with Israel. He defined the main task ahead as “completing the comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories, at the forefront of which is Holy Jerusalem, the capital city of our independent state.” This was to be achieved by negotiation with Israel.Meshaal, conversely, called for “liberation first, then the state; a genuine state is the fruit of liberation not negotiations.” He stressed that national principles should be achieved “without recognizing Israel.”
Hamas can credibly claim to have implemented this approach in Gaza. However, as was the case for Arafat and the PLO in 1994, acquiring meaningful autonomy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—let alone genuine independence—poses a far greater challenge. Hamas’s military capability gives it some leverage—enough to deter Israel from invading Gaza in November and to dissuade it from undermining the status quo there. But it has proven completely unable to compel Israel to stop settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, let alone reverse it and, ultimately, withdraw completely from the occupied territories.
Nor would Israel allow Hamas to attain that level of coercive military capability. The PLO went through a similar experience in the late 1970s, as Israel sought to impede the Palestinians’ military buildup in south Lebanon. In July 1981, Israel launched massive air raids on PLO headquarters in Beirut that left some 500 dead—mostly civilians—but accepted an unfavorable ceasefire after coming under sustained PLO artillery fire on its northern towns. Less than a year later, it invaded Lebanon and drove the PLO out.
But what the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was responding to was not the military threat posed by the PLO. Rather, it was the PLO’s shift toward adopting a negotiated, two-state solution to the conflict, reflected in growing West European engagement with the organization and the start of an informal dialogue with the U.S. administration. The PLO could not use its military capability in Lebanon to force Israel to give up territory but could parlay it into diplomatic gains.
Meshaal appears to have reached a similar conclusion. When he deemed “all forms of political and diplomatic struggle . . . worthless without armed resistance” in his Gaza speech, he did more to introduce diplomacy to Hamas’s lexicon and legitimize it than to belittle it. And in emphasizing that “whoever wishes to engage politically must start with rockets,” Meshaal signaled an intention to undertake just such an engagement.
Meshaal’s closing remarks moreover echoed Arafat’s address to the UN General Assembly in November 1974. Then, Arafat said: “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” In 2012, Meshaal somewhat less memorably told “the whole world . . . we tried you for 64 years and you did nothing, so don’t blame us for resorting to resistance, had we found a path other than war we would have taken it.”
Hamas believes the Arab Spring has given it a strategic opportunity to end its isolation and acquire external recognition. But acceptance in the regional order—even one heavily shaped by fellow “centrist” Islamist parties in Egypt and elsewhere—requires Hamas to operate by the system’s rules and interests.
In this, too, Hamas is following a path taken by the PLO. When the Arab League recognized the PLO as “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people and helped it win observer status at the UN in the mid-1970s, it was expected to reciprocate by pledging noninterference in the internal affairs of Arab states—a position also stated by Meshaal in his Gaza speech—as well as to adopt a diplomatic strategy that they could promote internationally.
Hamas has a long way to go before it will engage directly with Israel, as the PLO eventually did. Rather, like Israel, it is content to uphold a long truce based on mutual understandings and undertakings regarding security, while maintaining and expanding existing functional arrangements relating to economic activity, infrastructure, and public utilities. Hamas seeks stability and consolidation, and clearly sees achieving economic growth and generating jobs as a key to extending its political control over Gaza indefinitely, whether or not national reconciliation with Fatah and reintegration with the West Bank Palestinian Authority are achieved.
Having survived the last seven lean years, Hamas is now set to enjoy the proverbial seven fat years. This will be true only in Gaza, where Hamas has changed the rules of engagement with Israel. The West Bank, however, is an entirely different matter. There, Hamas may have to follow in Arafat’s footsteps in devising a diplomatic strategy that allows it to replicate the quasi-independence it enjoys in Gaza.