If you’re feeling overwhelmed, as many of us are, by the frightful scenes coming to us every day from Gaza – not to mention the atrocities that triggered this particular wave of conflict – you might be searching for some explanation of how things got to such a state. To that end, I’ve spent the last day rereading everything I’ve written about Hamas over the years.
It’s a sobering experience: to see how little has changed, and how, where it has, it has changed for the worse in ways that were wholly predictable at the time. I was going to just pick out a couple of highlights, but I think it’s worth going through the whole story. So here it is; links are included to the original articles, either in Crikey or on this blog. Draw your own conclusions.
Force has to be met by force, and IRA assassins were rightly treated as criminals. But the strength of democracy was that force was not the only response; we never descended to the terrorists’ level of mindless violence. The IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, was allowed to operate as a political party, and the prospect was held out to them that their objectives could be addressed by peaceful means. Finally, John Major and Tony Blair took the political risks of serious negotiations.
This strategy is not likely to work for the hard-core fanatics of al-Qaeda, but most movements that use terror as a tactic are not like that. ETA, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Tamil Tigers, the Chechens, the separatists of southern Thailand – all these and many more have concrete, coherent political objectives that in principle can be the subject of negotiation and compromise.
August 2005, on peace in Northern Ireland
But stifling democracy because the wrong side might win is a recipe for disaster. The uncomfortable truth that no-one wants to admit, but which The Australian seems to have dimly cottoned on to, is that if there is to be lasting peace then one day an Israeli government and Hamas will have to be willing to sit down and talk to each other.
December 2005, on the leadup to Palestinian elections
At one level, this is inspirational stuff. Two armed groups with a bloody history have submitted to the verdict of a fair election. Fatah prime minister Ahmed Qurei has resigned, and Fatah leaders have promised to serve as a democratic opposition and allow Hamas to form a government. This sort of thing has been all too rare in the Arab world.
But a commitment to democracy means accepting the risk that the wrong side might win. The already-fraught “peace process” will now be put to its severest test, since Israel can hardly be blamed for ruling out a partnership with a armed group committed to its destruction.
It remains true, as I said last month, that for a lasting peace to happen Israel and Hamas are one day going to have to sit down and talk to each other. But it had been expected that that was something the parties would be able to ease into gradually. Now Hamas, and therefore Israel as well, has been thrown in at the deep end.
January 2006, on Hamas’s election victory
Meanwhile Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was in Egypt, where the Egyptian government lent its backing to demands that Hamas should renounce violence and recognise Israel. Formal recognition is probably a long way off, but Hamas may be able to find some formula that it can live with as a basis for negotiations. …
So despite last week’s political earthquake, there are some hopeful signs. … And public opinion seems to be solidly in favour of negotiations: a poll last week in Israel found 48% in favour of direct talks with Hamas, and two-thirds support for “talks with an administration that includes Hamas,” while one in the Palestinian territories found that “84% of Palestinians want a negotiated peace agreement with Israel” and “nearly three-quarters want Hamas to drop its demand for the destruction of Israel.”
February 2006, on the election aftermath
[V]iolent protest is a way of life in this part of the world – not because Muslims are naturally less peaceful than westerners, but because government has been so authoritarian for so long that violence is the only way of getting heard.
That’s why the triumph of Hamas, despite its dangerous ideology, is not necessarily a bad thing. It at least showed that the democratic road to conflict resolution is still open. When was the last time that any Arab government, even one as ramshackle as the Palestinian Authority, was voted out of office?
Christian fundamentalists don’t express themselves in violent mobs the way Muslim fundamentalists do, but that’s because they don’t have to. Instead they operate in functioning democracies where politicians can be found to do their bidding …
February 2006, on an Egyptian ferry disaster
The neoconservative nightmare of a Hamas government has moved a step closer, with prime minister-designate Ismail Haniyeh presenting the names of his proposed ministry to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
At the weekend, Haniyeh gave his most explicit indication yet that he wants to pursue peace with Israel. Interviewed by CBS news he was asked “if he could foresee a day when he would be invited to the White House to sign a peace agreement with the Israelis”, and answered, “Let’s hope so.”
But pressure from the US and its allies is believed to be partly responsible for the refusal of other Palestinian groups to join in a coalition government, as Hamas had hoped.
March 2006, on Hamas forming government
The example of western relations with Iran’s occasional ally, Hamas, is certainly not encouraging. The withholding of financial aid certainly made sense as an expression of pique. But as policy, its objective was never clear. Wiser heads advised that aid should be continued on a provisional basis to give the new government an opportunity to show some moderation. …
Sure enough, Hamas now evidently feels it has nothing to lose, as shown by its failure to condemn this week’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Le Figaro’s editorial yesterday pointed out that since the sanctions had already been used without success, they couldn’t be imposed again: “The West reacted vigorously when the ballot box spoke. When terrorism kills, it contents itself with verbal protests.”
April 2006, on sanctions against Iran
Sometimes the biggest problem with negotiations is how to get them started. The Middle East has been stuck in this problem for some months now. The new Hamas-led government clearly wants to talk to Israel – there would have been no point in Hamas running for election otherwise. But it doesn’t know how to start.
The Israelis, understandably enough, baulk at negotiations with people who refuse to recognise their right to exist. Hamas, equally understandably, wants to save recognition of Israel for the negotiations themselves, rather than make the key concession beforehand without getting anything in return. Result: deadlock, with increasing violence and a financial crisis in the Palestinian territories.
June 2006, on negotiations
The current conflict has shown that Israel can do enormous damage to its enemies’ infrastructure, but without reoccupation of territory the problem won’t go away. At some point the troops and planes have to come home, Hamas and Hezbollah will rebuild, and the cycle starts over again.
So what is the answer? It’s possible that there isn’t one; not every problem has a solution. But before both sides commit themselves to perpetual war, negotiation should be given every chance.
We know that last month Hamas were almost on the point of accepting proposals that implicitly recognised Israel’s right to exist (a step that is overwhelmingly supported by the Palestinian population). Perhaps a few gestures from Israel could bring them the extra distance. Free some prisoners, release some customs revenue, make some symbolic concessions, and see what happens.
July 2006, on fighting in Gaza and Lebanon
Hamas’s problem is its failure to recognise Israel – a step which, understandably enough, it expects should be the outcome of negotiations, rather than something to be given away at the start. But its decision to participate in last January’s election was an implicit commitment to the path of negotiations rather than violence.
Now, even as there is unprecedented recognition that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is fundamental to the future of the region, that major step forward is being undone.
The reaction to its victory has taught Hamas that Western support for democracy is selective, and that electoral participation brings it no benefits. If as a result it boycotts new elections, the Palestinian territory will return to the old model of an effective one-party state, with Fatah lacking any democratic legitimacy and Hamas lacking any incentive for restraint in its campaign against the occupation.
December 2006, on Abbas’s call for fresh elections
It’s a long time since there’s been much cause for celebration in the Palestinian territories. The Hamas government of prime minister Ismail Haniya, elected a year ago, has been boycotted by both Israel and the United States, and the cycle of violence, poverty and dysfunctional administration has only gotten worse.
The US has tried to build up Fatah as a counter to Hamas, despite the fact that Hamas has done a better job in recent months of observing the ceasefire with Israel. The American motto appeared to be “millions for civil war, not one cent for public services”, although, as this morning’s Age reports, American aid could be a kiss of death in Palestinian politics. …
But if you really believe your opponent is intransigent, you have nothing to lose by trying the path of negotiation. At worst, you’ll be proved right and display the high moral ground. At best, you might be wrong and find that agreement is possible after all. That’s a message that Hamas and Israel both need to take on board.
February 2007, on a deal between Fatah and Hamas
Meanwhile, the American and Israeli policy of fomenting conflict among the Palestinian factions … has been paying dividends, with fierce fighting in the Gaza strip, in which Hamas appears to be getting the upper hand.
That may or may not have been the intended result. Certainly it would be only human for the Israeli leadership to prefer that the Palestinians spend their time killing one another rather than killing Jews. But as a policy it has been extraordinarily short sighted.
Isolating Hamas has sent Palestinians the message that democracy is futile. If they have taken that message to heart, then things could get much worse: a faction that takes power as a result of armed struggle is likely to have a very different approach to one that wins a democratic election.
June 2007, on fighting between Fatah and Hamas (no longer findable on the Crikey website)
If the west was serious about democracy in the Middle East, it would be looking to Turkey as an example, and trying to encourage movements like Hamas to develop along the same lines as the AKP. But the US has isolated and therefore radicalised those movements, supporting instead the corrupt and anti-democratic Arab establishments.
July 2007, on “Islamism”
Educated in the United States, Netanyahu is closely identified with the neoconservative worldview, but an Israeli leader is in a very different position to an American policymaker. While George Bush’s neocons were able to indulge their geopolitical fantasies by means of the world’s largest military machine, Netanyahu will have to cope in a hostile neighborhood …
A narrow right-wing government would have to drive Hamas from power, assassinate its leaders, expand the West Bank settlements, repudiate negotiations with Syria, maybe even bomb Iran – or else risk the wrath of its supporters by trying to compromise on those policies. …
Meanwhile it’s been left to Hamas to utter some uncomfortable truths.
The group’s political leader, Khaled Mashal, told an Italian newspaper at the weekend that “The great powers need us to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict,” and that negotiations with Hamas were only “a matter of time.”
March 2009, on Netanyahu’s new government
Sometimes, peace in the Middle East seems tantalisingly close, as if just a little more effort is needed to reach a set of propositions that different parties can all live with. At other times, it seems absurdly far away, as if the parties have so little in common that there is really nothing for them to talk about. This is one of those times. …
Another sign is the increased murmuring, in both Europe and America, about negotiating with Hamas – something that will have to happen one day if peace is to have a chance. Hamas leader Khaled Meshal duly came to the party on Monday in a long interview with The New York Times, saying “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce.”
Almost mirroring Netanyahu’s position, Meshal refuses to directly recognise Israel’s legitimacy, describing that demand as “a pretext by the United States and Israel to escape dealing with the real issue”. No doubt true, but then why not call their bluff?
May 2009, on peace prospects
But fundamentally this is all old news. The parties have made similar commitments many times without getting any closer to resolution. Moreover, the obstacles to peace all appear to be getting worse rather than better: the settlements keep growing, Israeli public opinion seems more intransigent than ever, Hamas is firmly entrenched in Gaza, and the Fatah administration on the West Bank is hopelessly discredited.
And as the obstacles grow, so the consequences of failure appear in starker relief.
September 2009, on peace talks between Israel and Fatah
Israeli policy seems to be stuck in a sphere of unreality where a two-state solution is officially proclaimed as the goal, but there is a taboo on any discussion of measures – dismantling settlements, partition of Jerusalem, negotiations with Hamas – that are self-evidently necessary for reaching that goal.
Presumably, Netanyahu’s objective is to keep playing out the charade, and to hold off American exasperation and international intervention until his retirement, or at least until the next election. But there is surely a limit as to how long this tactic can work.
December 2009, on Netanyahu and the settlers
Israel has now moved beyond its ritual demonisation of Hamas to the point where even Western sympathisers with Hamas are ipso facto regarded as terrorists. The fact that some members of the aid convoy had been filmed singing pro-Hamas songs is being treated in all seriousness as a justification for killing them.
The barriers to negotiation on both sides are great and are growing. Hamas’s past record of terror has helped to push Israeli politics to the right, and Israel’s treatment of Gaza has in turn discredited the voices for moderation within Hamas.
While intransigence is a general problem, at the moment Israeli intransigence is more significant: first because Israeli politics has shifted more dramatically, and secondly because Israeli co-operation is more vital. One can imagine a peace process (much abused term though that is) that starts without Hamas but brings it in at a later stage, but without Israel it will be all but impossible to get a process going in the first place.
… Yet the dispute is not fundamentally intractable; everyone knows more or less what a peace settlement would look like, if only enough goodwill could be generated to start things moving. Surely the prospect of Israel-Hamas talks is no more fantastic than the idea of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness sharing government in Northern Ireland.
Yet that happened. Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology, and former terrorists mutate into peaceful politicians all the time. It can happen in the Middle East, but there is still a very long road ahead.
June 2010, on Israeli piracy in the Mediterranean
Although, unlike the imperialists, [the neoconservatives] thought democracy was a good thing, their primary interest was support for the Israeli right and a consequent hatred of the Arabs. They were able to shut down Bush’s support for democracy after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006.
The neo-cons believed Arabs were unfit for and incapable of democracy.
When they argued that Israel should not negotiate with Arab governments because they were dictatorships, this was not intended as a reason to support democracy, but rather as a justification for never negotiating.
Democracy was not a carrot to offer the Arabs, it was a stick with which to beat them.
February 2011, on the Arab Spring
And it serves as a reminder that Abbas’s PA is not all there is to Palestinian activism, and that there is no reason to suppose that the alternatives will be, from Israel’s point of view, any easier to deal with. They may be much harder.
It’s a common but rather strange misapprehension that intransigence can bring moderation to an adversary’s demands. Israel and its allies on the American right seem to have worked on the basis that by refusing to meet even the moderate Palestinian leadership half way, they would encourage it to weaken its demands further or secure its replacement by still more moderate elements.
In fact, of course, the reverse is usually the case: intransigence breeds intransigence, unmet demands are escalated not retracted, and concessions that were refused to moderates end up having to be made – with interest – to extremists. See for examples the British in Ireland, the French in Algeria and the whites in Zimbabwe.
May 2011, on Palestinian unrest
For the Israeli right, the ascendancy of Hamas following the 2006 elections proved to be a godsend. It gave them credibility in their assertion that there was no “partner for peace” on the Palestinian side and allowed them to stonewall on negotiations, despite pressure from Europe and the US.
But until now this has not been a good year for Hamas. Its stewardship of Gaza is seen as a failure, the much-promised reconciliation with Abbas’s Fatah has failed to materialise, and the Arab Spring has cast doubt on its confrontational model. According to a survey reported this month in Time, its support is down to just 28%, having fallen especially among young people.
… All the more reason, then, for Benyamin Netanyahu to decide to give Hamas a boost and take Abbas down a peg or two. Because Shalit’s release is popular in Israel, it also strengthens Netanyahu domestically against any criticism for failure to advance the peace process.
If Netanyahu and Likud were serious about peace, of course, such an approach would make no sense. Why go out of your way to weaken Abbas, the most compliant Palestinian leader Israel is ever likely to get, and strengthen the very hardliners that you’ve been telling the world you can never negotiate with?
But as soon as you assume that Israel’s Right doesn’t actually want peace – at least not on terms that the Palestinians could conceivably accept – then everything falls into place. Netanyahu doesn’t want a credible interlocutor; he wants a weak and divided Palestinian leadership at war with itself. Hence the need to play off Hamas against Fatah, and help whichever one seems to be flagging.
October 2011, on the release of Gilad Shalit
The evaluation of a policy as a success or not depends on what it was trying to achieve. If you accept the goal of a peace settlement based on the creation of a Palestinian state, then Bush’s policy was clearly a disaster. But it’s much more logical to believe that policy was being run by people who did not accept that goal; who shared Likud’s view that a permanent state of conflict was preferable to the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, and who were therefore trying not so much to advance the peace process as to stymie it.
From that point of view, the policy has been remarkably successful. No unified Palestinian government; no negotiations; no progress towards Palestinian statehood; no halt to the process of colonisation in the West Bank. Hamas still rules in Gaza, powerless to do much to help its people but invaluable to the Israeli government as a scapegoat for all the ills of the region.
February 2013, on a review of American policy
The point is not that Hamas doesn’t engage in terrorist tactics: clearly it does … [But] thinking of them as the sort of group for whom terrorism is fundamental to their existence – like an al-Qa’eda, or a latter-day Baader-Meinhof gang – misunderstands what is going on and leads to completely inappropriate tactics.
The idea of pursuing even a medium-term truce with a Baader-Meinhof gang is absurd. And because Likud thinks of Hamas the same way, it places no importance on negotiation or even on keeping to the terms of agreements it has already negotiated.
If Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu were dealing with an ordinary state or state-like actor, he would realise the need to act with at least a basic minimum of good faith: recognising that the other party has interests of its own that it will try (perhaps badly) to promote, and that any agreement has to address the concerns of both sides. But he simply doesn’t see Hamas in those terms.
The notion of “terrorism”, even though not unfairly applied, blinds him and his supporters to the reality of what can and cannot be achieved.
July 2014, on “terrorism”
Islamist groups cover a broad range, from the AKP in Turkey and Ennahda in Tunisia, through to Hamas and Hezbolloah. The term can also be taken to extend to groups that reject democratic political participation entirely, such as the Taliban and ISIS/Da’esh. But to take these latter as representative of Islamism is a serious distortion.
… Kept to a narrow range, embracing political parties in democracies or quasi-democracies, it’s a useful term, just like “Christian democrat”. Extended to terrorists, it becomes less a tool of analysis and more like a smear, implying that any introduction of Islam to politics is the equivalent of terrorism – or worse, that all Muslims are ipso facto potential terrorists.
March 2016, on “Islamism”
On any conceivable test, the Saudi regime is much more extreme in its fundamentalism, and more closely linked to the terrorists of Da’esh/IS or Al-Qaeda, than the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas.
The big thing about groups like the Muslim Brotherhood is not just that they believe in some sort of political Islam – that’s normal for the region – but that they have popular support and are trying to bring about democratic change. …
That’s not to say that the Brotherhood and its sister parties would necessarily remain democratic if they took power. But so far their record is a lot better than that of their opponents. The potential is there to bring political Islam within the democratic tent, in much the way that the Christian Democrat parties did for political Christianity in the period after the Second World War.
And that’s what forms the common bond between the Saudis and the hard right in the United States – both the neoconservatives and the Trumpian nationalists. Both are committed to the view that Islamic democracy is impossible; the Saudis because it threatens their autocracy, the Americans because it means admitting the Arabs to the status of real political players.
July 2017, on the Saudi-Qatari feud
Abbas’s term expired in 2009, but he has remained in office, and various proposals for new parliamentary and/or presidential elections have come to nothing. In the most recent such plan, leaders of Fatah and Hamas, claiming to have “reached a real consensus,” announced last September that the parliamentary election would be held first, within six months. A subsequent decree set the date for next week, 22 May.
But of course it was not to be. An essential condition, from the Palestinian point of view, was that voting would be possible in occupied East Jerusalem, which the Israeli government regards as Israeli territory. A request to Israel to that effect met with a non-committal response, on the not entirely unreasonable ground that there was no proper Israeli government in being to consider it.
Abbas took that as the excuse he had evidently been looking for to postpone the election indefinitely, with the support of Israel and the US: again, on the basis that it might result in success for Hamas. Peter Beinart was suitably scathing, pointing out that “The Biden administration is uncomfortable with Palestinian democracy for the same reason many Republicans are uncomfortable with American democracy. Because the wrong people sometimes win.”
May 2021, on Palestinian elections
The World is Not Enough 
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