Diplomatic defeat for Hamas after victory
When the guns in and around Gaza fell silent a month ago, Hamas, the radical Palestinian Islamist movement that runs the enclave, boasted of having won its 50-day war with Israel. But now, after the victory marches, Hamas is being forced to stage a tactical retreat, if not yet a surrender, in the bargaining to decide the future of the devastated territory.
Meeting in Egypt’s intelligence headquarters in Cairo on September 25th, Hamas’s leaders bowed to the terms set by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs the West Bank, and by Egypt to begin rebuilding the Gaza Strip.
Hamas agreed to transfer control of Gaza’s border crossings, the government machinery and the responsibility for reconstruction to the PA leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, and 3,000 personnel of his presidential guard. The agreement also provided for the withdrawal of Hamas forces from a 5-kilometre buffer along the border with Egypt, say Palestinian officials. Within a fortnight, they say a committee will start vetting Hamas’s bureaucrats, and within three months, Egyptian officers will start work on sifting through Hamas’s security forces to create a single armed force under Abbas’s command.
All this goes far beyond the reconciliation deal on sharing power that the rival Palestinian groups jubilantly announced in April 2014. Since then the war with Israel (partly caused by Israel's rejection of the unity deal) gave Hamas a popular boost. Left on the sidelines of the conflict, Abbas looked ineffectual to many Palestinians: unable to deliver peace through negotiations with Israel, yet unwilling to fight the occupier. Now that the fighting has stopped, Abbas seems determined to reassert his influence. Indeed he wants to turn back the clock not just by weeks but by years as he seeks to restore his control of the Gaza territory he lost in a four-day armed clash with Hamas in 2007.
At a meeting with businessmen from Gaza earlier this week in his West Bank seat of Ramallah, Abbas said his officials would not return to Gaza until Hamas abandoned its “shadow” government. Never again would they humiliate his ministers, as happened when they greeted his health minister during the Gaza war with tomatoes and shoes. If Hamas leaders balked, one participant quoted him as saying, they could forget reconstruction; just let them wait for the winter rains when the 100,000 Palestinians left homeless by their war would turn against Hamas rulers.
Hamas cadres, already angered at sacrificing hundreds of men and relatives in a war which ended with the siege still in place, flinch at Abbas’s terms, and question whether they can be implemented. Abbas’s agreement to advance partial wages for up to 25,000 civil servants, but for none of Hamas’s 15,000 security and intelligence personnel, only fuelled their resentment.
Hamas newspapers played down the agreement, speaking only in generalities; their preachers sidestepped it in their Friday sermons, as did the website of its military wing, the Ezz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Hamas’ leaders say that an explosion may well happen if there is no reconstruction, but claim it would be directed against Israel rather than them. In possible preparation for another round of fighting, militiamen were seen pinning notices outside mosques offering training for a “popular army”.
Along with their military positions, some cadres complain, Hamas is also sacrificing principles, including the refusal formally to recognise Israel. The agreement, said negotiators, amount to a Hamas commitment to a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1967 border that predated Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the West Bank. What prercisely this means is yet to be established. Hamas claims all of Israel and the Palestinian territories, but has in the past said a state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be possible in return for a long-term ceasefire, not a permanent peace agreement that recognises the legitimacy of the Jewish state. More importantly, perhaps, Hamas’s lead negotiator in Cairo, Musa Abu Marzouq, also suggested that Hamas consider direct negotiations with Israel, in place of the current indirect ones.
For now, Hamas has few good options. Much of its financial and military strength is spent. Qatar is the most recent of its patrons to cut back support, and Egypt has turned hostile since a military coup last year ousted the elected president, Muhammad Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's parent organisation. Egypt’s decision to plug smuggling tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border, and the loss revenues from taxes on the imports, have further weakened Hamas. Israel’s bombardment cost it much of its arsenal and manpower.
The war may have revived its popularity and political capital, but to keep its support Hamas will have to deliver on its promise to rebuild Gaza. Without serious steps towards handing over power to Abbas ahead of an international aid conference in Cairo on October 12th, it fears donors will withhold the promised reconstruction.
Hamas officials still try to put on a brave face. In contrast with Egypt, their movement has not been banned or jailed, and Hamas remains overwhelmingly Gaza’s most potent force. Though Egypt insists that Hamas remove its forces far from the border before reopening its border crossing at Rafah, Hamas cadres say in practice their fighters can melt easily among the population, ensuring that the PA formal presence will be little more than symbolic. In the longer term, some argue, whatever reconstruction Abbas brings to Gaza today will be Hamas’s tomorrow, come the day when they regain full power by the ballot or the bullet.
The war with Israel led to the destruction or severe damage of 18,000 homes, 148 schools and over half of Gaza’s 32 hospitals, says the UN. But Egypt and Israel continue to keep their borders firmly shut for reconstruction materials and travel for the bulk of Gaza’s 1.8 million people. Even the pre-war infrastructure projects that Qatar had funded, at a cost of $400m, have ground to a halt for want of materials. And though engineers have managed to repair the power plant which Israel bombed in the war, disagreements between Hamas and Abbas over who should pay for the fuel continue to leave Palestinians without electricity for all but six hours a day.
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