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Letter to the editor

Picking sides in Gaza not clear-cut

Hamas may offer a better chance for change.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published June 21, 2007

Last week's takeover of the Gaza Strip by the radical Islamic group Hamas was a disturbing stumble on the road to peace. But the strategy that Israel and the West are pursuing could well be a dead end.

In throwing their full support behind the rival Fatah faction, Israel, the United States and Europe are backing an organization plagued by corruption, cronyism and diminished credibility among the Palestinians themselves.

And Fatah's head -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen -- is widely considered a weak leader whose credentials as a "moderate" have been belied by Fatah's own propensity for violence.

"Abu Mazen is impotent, he can't do anything, and Israel and the West have been falsely investing in him what he cannot deliver," says Raphael Israeli, professor of Islamic studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Conversely, Hamas is better organized and disciplined, as shown by its decisive victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections and its rout of the larger Fatah forces in Gaza this month. For that reason, Hamas could be a better negotiating partner for Israel in the long run than Fatah and Abbas, some experts say.

"If you want to end the violence, fighting and terrorism, then you have an interest in your adversary being politically coherent and able to speak with authority for the people it represents," says Hugh Roberts, an expert on Islamic activism.

"But there is very strong evidence that there is no will in the Israeli government and allied Western states to seek a real resolution. If you want a resolution, you have to stop playing divide and rule among the Palestinians."

Hamas built support

Israel has long struggled with how to deal with Hamas. The Jewish state initially supported it as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, only to deem Hamas a terrorist group when it turned to suicide bombings as a tool in its stated goal of destroying Israel.

As Arafat and his Fatah cronies siphoned off huge amounts of international aid money, Hamas built popular support -- especially among the 1.5-million Palestinians in Gaza - by providing social services to the poor. It parlayed that into a political wing that triumphed last year in what has been called the fairest, most democratic election ever held in an Arab country.

But with Hamas unwilling to renounce violence or accept Israel's existence, the West and Israel cut off direct aid to the new Hamas government while continuing tacit support for Fatah. That contributed to power struggles culminating in last week's bloody takeover of Gaza.

In some ways, it "was a Pyrrhic victory because while it showed Hamas' overwhelming military capability, it didn't serve the organization very well politically," says Amnon Aran, a Mideast expert at the London School of Economics.

"Hamas, unlike Islamic Jihad, is very much a popular movement, and this increasing use of violence against civilians is severely denting its image."

Still, some experts detect a more moderate strain within Hamas that could have been nurtured, first after it won the 2006 elections, and again this year when it formed a "unity government" with Fatah. Nor is it too late to give Hamas a chance to it show it can govern, at least in Gaza, says Israeli of Hebrew University.

"We should say, 'We'll help you and open the border to send goods and medicines across, but provided you immediately return (kidnapped Israeli soldier) Gilad Shalit, that you stop the bombing and you stop smuggling weapons across the border,' " Israeli says.

"If you don't do that, you will suffer at our hands, and you will starve with your own people. I think they are sensible enough to choose the other course."

The Palestinian infighting has prompted talk of a "three-state" solution to the Mideast conflict -- Israel living with a Fatah-controlled West Bank and a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. But Hamas has enough support even in the West Bank that Abbas must reach some accommodation with it if Palestinians are ever to achieve their goal of a viable state.

"If you really want a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, it has to be seen by the Palestinians has having legitimacy," says William Quandt, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

"If it's made by a faction of their political system that's seen as playing the American-Israeli game, it will be rejected by a very large proportion of Palestinians as illegitimate."

Repeating history?

Quandt, an expert on Algeria, notes some similarities between that country's brutal modern history and the current Palestinian situation.

During Algeria's 1954-62 war of independence, France and its president, Charles de Gaulle, initially "tried to pump up their preferred moderate nationalist leader," Quandt says. "It led to a lot of internal Algerian violence over who had the right to speak on behalf of the Algerian people."

Between 1991 and 2002, more than 160,000 people died in a civil war that erupted when the Algerian government canceled elections because it appeared an Islamist group would win.

Though the Algerian vote was disrupted while the Palestinian election went ahead, it was the West in both cases that had pushed the existing leadership to introduce political pluralism.

"The question to ask is, 'What on earth do Western governments think they are doing putting this kind of pressure on and then refusing to accept the outcome?' " says Roberts, author of The Battlefield Algeria. "The long-term effect of this is to discredit very profoundly the Western discourse on democracy."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 21, 2007, 00:21:48]