Putting all the eggs in Fatah
basket By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
With the dust of Hamas' triumphant
counter-coup in the Gaza Strip yet to settle,
Israel and the United States have wasted little
time on a counter-strategy, of supporting the
rival Fatah organization in West Bank and trying
to isolate Hamas economically and diplomatically.
This they are doing by rallying the "moderate
Arab" support for Fatah and, in Israel's case, by
preparing for a full invasion of Gaza.
Yet
none of these amount to a prudent response, and
the best option would appear to be to let Hamas
try its chances at ruling
Gaza
while various interlocutors in the Arab and
Islamic world work on rebuilding the broken
bridges between the two dominant Palestinian
organizations.
Even the staunchly
pro-Israel Washington Post has recognized the
pitfalls of the Israel-US response,
editorializing: "The most dangerous illusion to
emerge from the US-Israeli discussions is the idea
that Hamas can be isolated in Gaza while Mr
[Palestinian President Mahmud] Abbas is built up
in the West Bank."
An influential Hamas
politician, Ahmed Yousef, writing an op-ed column
in the New York Times under the heading "What
Hamas wants", has reiterated Hamas' willingness to
play politics with Israel, stating:
From the day Hamas won the general
elections in 2006, it offered Fatah the chance
of joining forces and forming a unity
government. It tried to engage the international
community to explain its platform for peace. It
has consistently offered a 10-year ceasefire
with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere
of calm in which we resolve our differences.
Hamas even adhered to a unilateral ceasefire for
18 months in an effort to normalize the
situation on the ground. None of these points
appear to have been recognized in the press
coverage of the last few days.
Ahmed's
last comment quoted above is indisputable. Case in
point: Martin Indyk, a well-known pro-Israel
pundit, has written an article in the Los Angeles
Times that tersely refers to "the two-state
solution, Palestinian style", omitting any
criticism of Israel's iron-fist occupation policy
and placing all the blame on the Palestinians,
mentioning Hamas' attack on Abbas' presidential
palace yet, rather curiously, failing to mention
what Yousef has pointed out in his New York Times
piece, the fact that it was precipitated by
Fatah's attack on the home of democratically
elected Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah, which
is precisely why the appellation "counter-coup"
for describing the developments in Gaza is not
altogether inappropriate.
The pertinent
question now is whether or not Hamas will be given
a chance to rule Gaza, with or without partnership
with Fatah. Clearly Israel, which has commenced
its air strikes and military incursions inside
Gaza already, has no intention of allowing this to
happen, hedging its bets on the collapse of Hamas
rule one way or another, including the economic
strangulation of the whole population, to bring
them to their knees.
Left-leaning Israeli
author Gideon Levy has aptly described the
starvation already sweeping Gaza and the
"thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked
people unable to receive any treatment ... The
shadows of human beings roam the ruins ... They
only know the [Israeli army] will return and they
know what this will mean for them: more
imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death
and destruction in monstrous proportions."
With the United States' Middle East peace
policy in complete disarray, allowing Israel to
continue with its unreconstructed oppressive
policy will only exacerbate Washington's negative
image in the Middle East. It is equally necessary
to recognize the importance of giving Hamas a
chance to breathe, to bring stability to Gaza and
to demonstrate its statecraft, instead of seeking
to "nip it in the bud", a virtual impossibility at
this critical juncture.
Lest we forget,
the outgoing United Nations envoy for the Middle
East, Alvaro de Soto, has rightly criticized the
disastrous US-European policy toward the
Palestinian elections in Gaza, which must now be
revisited in light of the serious backlash in the
form of Hamas' victory.
"The Quartet took
all pressure off Israel. With all the focus on the
failings of Hamas, the Israeli settlement
enterprise and barrier construction [have]
continued unabated," de Soto writes in his report,
which has, sadly, fallen on deaf ears, as the
European Union's rush to condemn Hamas and support
Fatah clearly demonstrates.
Europe must
now balance its flawed approach and exert a
moderating influence on Israel, by pressuring it
to stop its manipulation of humanitarian
assistance to the starving Gazan people for the
sake of political gains, and to convince
Washington that its refusal to engage Hamas in
dialogue is counterproductive and dangerous.
Much as certain hawkish pro-Israel pundits
such as Daniel Pipes insist that "the only
solution is military", there is, in fact, no
military solution to the Palestinian problem, only
a wise political solution that has been shunned by
all Israeli leaders so far, respecting the rights
of Palestinians.
On Hamas' part, the rays
of hope discerned in Yousef's piece in the New
York Times, for a reasonable Hamas approach to the
issue of rapprochement with Israel, must be
expanded by meaningful Hamas actions that prove it
is more than a public relations attempt and that
its cadres are adept at not only the art of
warfare and martyrdom but also the ingredients of
diplomacy and statecraft. That is Hamas' critical
test at this hour and, by the looks of it, Israel
and its US supporters are hell-bent on preventing
Hamas from passing this test.
Kaveh
L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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