The Hamas factor - Volume 10, Issue 4 - May 2004

 

Israel's eventual unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the erection of its 'security barrier' in the West Bank – both endorsed by the United States – could constitute a revolutionary change of the status quo in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The effective partition is based on an absence of trust that, in Israel's view, has rendered negotiated peace impossible for the moment. But strategically, Israel's moves are an implicit acknowledgment that any post-1967 Zionist aspiration to a 'Greater Israel' extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River is demographically untenable. On a more tactical level, they are warnings to the Palestinians that restraining terrorism remains the sine qua non of reviving the peace process premised on the 'roadmap' and prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state. Hamas, the strongest of the religiously motivated Palestinian terrorist groups, is the most formidable impediment to these objectives. Since the second intifada began over three years ago, Hamas's popularity has steadily increased. The question remains whether the Israeli withdrawal will make Hamas easier or harder to control and neutralise.

 

 

Hamas arose during the first intifada in December 1987. From the beginning, the group has been uninterested in political compromise. The group's ideological mission, as articulated in its 'Introductory Memorandum', is absolutist and inherently violent: 'The best way to conduct the fight with the Zionist enemy is … to keep the embers of conflict burning until the conditions for a decisive battle with the enemy are complete … Hamas believes it is impermissible under any circumstances to concede any part of Palestine or to recognize the Zionist occupation of it.' Hamas, then, considers Palestine wholly Muslim land, such that surrendering any of it would be sinful; one passage of its charter suggests that religious redemption turns on the destruction of the Jews. Thus, Hamas's leadership cannot easily endorse even temporary and tactical acquiescence in, still less public approval of, a two-state solution. Hamas has rejected peace deals like the one Israel and the Palestinians were negotiating at Taba in January 2001.

 

Reinforcing the group's bias towards force, many Hamas activists see the Lebanese group Hizbullah's bleeding of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as the cause of Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000. Like most political and military organisations, Hamas is divided between relative doves and hawks. It can therefore seem schizophrenic on issues of compromise and violence. Hamas has intermittently dialled back terrorist operations and edged towards negotiation, and some Hamas leaders have advocated an interim solution involving an armistice, an Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967 (including all of Jerusalem) and negotiations on other rights. Hamas leaders also established informal contacts with Israeli officials during the Oslo process. Nonetheless, hardliners have effectively vetoed any formal offer of an armistice, and rejected Israel's attempts in 1993–94 to establish a dialogue aimed at convincing the organisation to renounce violence in exchange for a guaranteed political role in any peace settlement. All ten of Hamas's declared or offered cease-fires between 1993 and 2002 were tactical: each one emerged when the group needed breathing room to regroup after pressure from a superior adversary – either Israel or the Palestinian Authority (PA). None has lasted longer than a few weeks.

 

The bottom line is that Hamas wants an Islamic Palestinian state in all of mandatory Palestine. No peace process can realistically yield this result, but the organisation's leadership believes that, over enough time and through sustained violence, it can produce it. Consequently, Hamas is extremely unlikely voluntarily to dispense with violence as a political tool – as, say, the Provisional Irish Republican Army has substantially done. Hamas's consistent refusal to join the PA government attests to the outfit's confidence in the viability of its unrepentant posture. It is true that Hamas has indicated that it might consider helping the PA run Gaza once the Israelis leave, and Hamas may see fit to avoid a decisive confrontation with the PA and Fatah, the main secular Palestinian party, until there is a Palestinian state. But it would then challenge its secular rivals for primacy in that state, which it would subsequently use as a platform for launching a revitalised campaign to eliminate the state of Israel. In this light, the disarmament of Hamas is a minimum prerequisite to a stable and viable Palestinian state.

 

Israel's response to Hamas's ongoing terrorism has been broadly to escalate counter-terrorism operations – targeting finances and known militant installations, re-occupying territory ceded to the PA under the Oslo accords and killing militant leaders. This has given Hamas ample political cover to continue suicide attacks that provoke further Israeli retaliation. The PA has been left to acquiesce in Israeli suppression, comply with demands to crack down on Hamas, or both. In any case, Hamas, not the PA, is viewed as the Palestinians' popular champion.

 

In May 2003, however, Hamas appeared outflanked. Fatah declared a unilateral cease-fire and the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia ('the Quartet') revived the peace process with the roadmap. Hamas would have looked like a violent spoiler denying Palestinians their chance for peace and statehood if it had not at least agreed to a tactical ceasefire, which it did in late June 2003. For its part, Israel reduced, but did not completely suspend, 'targeted killings'. Suicide bombings on 12 August by Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (as well as a Jerusalem attack a week later by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) were stated to be retaliation for continued assassinations. Hamas and Islamic Jihad formally ended their cease-fires in a joint statement issued on 22 August. It cost them nothing in political terms. In fact, their support among Palestinians increased after the 19 August bombing.

 

Although Fatah probably retains a more durable base of political support than Hamas, the fact that one out of six Palestinians receives some sort of social service from Hamas gives it an edge from day to day. The disintegration of the PA's sources of such assistance, which were never very efficient, imparted even greater political momentum to Hamas. The Israeli security forces have done their best to weaken Hamas's leadership prior to withdrawal from Gaza. On 22 March 2004, Israeli forces killed Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He was replaced by Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, who in turn was eliminated in an assassination on 17 April 2004 in Gaza City. Other senior figures have been killed or wounded since summer 2003. Yassin was half blind and a paraplegic, and his killing elicited vehement popular and official protest from Europe and throughout the Muslim world. Funeral marches in Gaza were a deliberate and impressive show of force by Hamas. According to a poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Research and Cultural Dialogue after his death, 31% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would vote for Hamas, compared to only 27% for Fatah. In Israel's counter-terrorism calculus, however, the operational benefits of disrupting the terrorist apparatus at the strategic planning level were judged to outweigh the political cost of momentary Palestinian outrage.

 

That calculus appeared to embody four main considerations. Firstly, while assassination of Hamas leaders may be provocative in the short term, the movement was already maximally radical and could not become more so. Although Yassin had manifested sporadic flexibility – for instance, theoretically accepting Jews as a client population in an Islamic state comprising mandatory Palestine – Rantisi consistently maintained that peace could take hold only after Jews had left that territory for their countries of origin, and he was bullish on Hamas's strengthening links with Hizbullah and Iran. Secondly, hitting mainly lower-level operatives arguably encouraged the leaders to be bolder by giving them less to fear. Thirdly, Rantisi was widely considered to be the most formidable opponent of the PA (which had imprisoned him for 21 months in the late 1990s). Eliminating him therefore stood to strengthen the PA vis-à-vis Hamas, and eventually to improve scope for the PA's constraining the group politically or by force. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, given the disarray in the PA, Hamas's characterisation of the prospective Israeli withdrawal as a Hizbullah-style military victory potentially opens the door for Hamas's political primacy in Gaza, the disintegration of Fatah there and, consequently, continuing instability. A tough stance against Hamas prior to withdrawal is intended to counter any impression among the Palestinians that Israel is acting out of weakness, to cripple Hamas operationally so that it cannot use Gaza as staging area for attacks in Israel, and to ensure the potency of Israel's military deterrent even after withdrawal.

 

On balance, the evidence suggests that the Israeli assessment was generally correct. Terrorist attacks in the West Bank diminished markedly after Yassin's death – even though Bush's April 2004 statement that territorial negotiations would have to account for 'major Israeli population centers' there and support for the security barrier might be expected to increase violence. Rantisi's avowed revenge for Yassin's death never came to pass. During his five-week tenure, Hamas carried out only one suicide bombing, killing an Israeli policeman. As of April, Israeli security forces were stopping 80–90% of Palestinian attacks, compared to 50% early in the second intifada. At the same time, the liquidation of the two Hamas leaders apparently shifted Hamas's internal balance of power from the relatively pragmatic Gaza-centred 'inside' leadership that heeded Yassin to the more hard-line Damascus-based 'outside' leadership (with which Rantisi sided) under Khaled Mashaal, head of the Political Bureau. Yet Mashaal's behaviour indicates that that the putative hard-liners themselves may feel intimidated by Israel's tough counter-terrorism policy. He resisted anointing Rantisi as Yassin's fully fledged successor, confining his leadership status to Gaza. In addition, he diffidently instructed Hamas-Gaza to keep secret the name of Rantisi's successor, and the group may even have settled for an interim collective leadership, which hints at a relatively quiescent mood. Hamas retracted an intemperate threat, implied after Rantisi's death, to attack the US.

 

Yassin's death deprived Hamas of its most charismatic leader. The assassination of Rantisi underscored Israel's unwillingness to acquiesce to Hamas's predominance in Gaza. Since then, the IDF has reinforced the message with Operation Rainbow – the bulldozing of Palestinian dwellings in the Rafah refugee camp on the Egyptian border. The tactical aim of the offensive is to preclude the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza through underground tunnels that have been dug from the Gaza neighbourhoods across the border by denying terrorists access to them, as well as to eliminate Hamas and other terrorist operatives. The strategic aim is to preserve the Israeli deterrent. On 18 May, the first day of Operation Rainbow, 20 Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians, and 90,000 people lost electric power and water service. While this would logically antagonise Hamas, countervailing factors appeared more substantial. Curtailing tunnel access reduced Hamas's operational capacity. The Israelis expressly reserved control over Gaza's borders and airspace pending the PA's control of the territory and its effective counter-terrorism, both of which appear to be distant eventualities. More broadly, the Israeli withdrawal has increased Egypt's incentive to extend security cooperation against Hamas in Gaza, as President Hosni Mubarak's secular regime would not welcome the political and operational ascendancy of a radical Islamist organisation on its eastern border. So far, however, Egypt has shown little stomach for confronting terrorists in Gaza.

 

The fact remains that Hamas is not Sinn Fein: it is more a rigid religious militia than a pragmatic political party, and it will conclusively relent only in response to force. A more effective application of force against Hamas is still essential to sustainable peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. To regain the popular support it needs to govern effectively, the PA – not Israel or the US – must be the agent that tames Hamas. Israeli efforts have rendered Hamas weaker than it was before. This would make it easier – both politically and operationally – for the PA to confront and disarm Hamas. But PA President Yasser Arafat is a terminally unacceptable interlocutor to Israel and the US, and will favour continued instability to stave off complete marginalisation. PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei is not sufficiently independent of Arafat to unleash the PA against Hamas without Arafat's backing.

 

While Hamas is probably still capable of a major attack, it is fairly clear that it cannot function at the tempo that it once did. The group is likely to continue terrorist operations to intensify the impression that Israel is withdrawing under fire – a tactic Arafat has encouraged. Bush's April statement commits the US to 'lead efforts' with Egypt, Jordan and other outside actors to build the 'capacity and will' of the PA to secure Gaza against Hamas and other terrorist groups without involving Israel. To ensure that a Gaza withdrawal facilitates the eventual resolution of the conflict and the conclusive defanging of Hamas, it would be best for Washington to begin these efforts soon. But Washington is not likely to re-immerse itself in the Middle East until after the inauguration of a newly elected American president in January 2005. Meanwhile, Israel is unlikely to see any alternative to continuing robust counter-terrorist operations prior to withdrawing from Gaza, and maintaining freedom of action for the IDF even after it has left.