MIFTAH
Thursday, 28 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

As Israel votes today, the country's evacuation of the Gaza Strip in September of last year and the unanticipated parliamentary victory by Hamas in January are related elements of a new political and security environment being built on the ruins of the Oslo era. Israel's unilateralism strikes at the heart of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' absolute reliance on negotiations as the key to independence. Hamas, on the other hand, views Israel's departure from Gaza as a victory for its strategy of "armed struggle."

Israel's security doctrine toward Gaza in this new era offers important insights into Israel's emerging strategy vis-a-vis the West Bank. In the new relationship with Gaza that Israel is attempting to establish, the strip becomes a foreign country rather than an unruly province of the Israeli armed forces, where the rules of war, not occupation, prevail. In post-disengagement Gaza, Israel counts upon its ability to use superior military assets to act when and wherever and with whatever instruments it chooses.

Implicit in this concept is Israel's grudging acceptance of the creation of a Palestinian military capability in Gaza of the kind it had previously opposed. Palestinian groups have not only increased the types and quality of their Gaza arsenals since disengagement, some of them continue to fire an array of missiles and mortars into Israel. Despite its preferences, the Israeli military has presided over the creation of a comparatively benign form of attrition on its border with Gaza.

Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Hamas' legislative victory highlight the paralyzing dilemma for the Palestinian Authority (PA) created by the Oslo agreements. If the PA has a security doctrine, it was one that was turned on its head during the Oslo era. The authority is precluded by design and function from defending itself and its people against Israeli actions. Palestinian security has been redefined to mean the suppression of Palestinian acts of violent resistance against Israel. Abbas lacks a mandate from his own public to outlaw actions of armed groups, even when these descend into terrorism, gang violence and hooliganism.

Hamas opposes the PLO's core strategy of entering into negotiations with Israel without reserving the option of the use of force. And it rejects the decision to elevate the resumption of talks to the level of a strategic objective. As Israel's policy of unilateralism matured and its decision to retreat from Gaza was implemented, Hamas, along with many Palestinians, saw the organization's critical assumptions vindicated. Hamas' decisions to support a truce, to contest national elections, and to explore conditions under which to engage Israel in negotiations are inter-related elements of a design borne of a changing environment sparked by the Israeli disengagement and the implosion of the PA. This trend suggests a willingness to employ instruments other than force or terror in pursuit of national objectives of liberation and domestic rehabilitation. But, in large part because of the failed precedent established by the PLO during the Oslo era, Hamas sees no purpose in surrendering the option to use force.

Hamas aspires to recreate on the Gaza frontier the kind of relative stability that had characterized Israel's border with Lebanon (and still does in the Shebaa Farms area). Hamas supports the evolution of understandings, or "rules of the game," on the Lebanese model, of the kind that have in fact evolved between the movement and Israel since the disengagement.

Hamas is unlikely to dismantle the Palestinian capability to employ force, one of a host of policy changes demanded by Israel and the West in order to admit the organization to polite company. In the movement's view the record of those Palestinian who have done so is not worth emulating. But just as it condemns Abbas for embracing negotiations as a strategic option, it must be careful that support for the use of force not degenerate into an absolute value in itself, and into an undisciplined preference for violence and terror for its own sake. The challenge for all parties to the conflict is to craft a political and diplomatic framework in which tools other than force and violence become the effective option of choice for all concerned.

Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.

 
 
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