Daily Alert Archives

Hamas and the Second Six-Day War: Implications, Challenges, and Opportunities

[Washington Institute for Near East Policy] Robert Satloff - The same Palestinians who reportedly tell pollsters they support a two-state solution with Israel gave their vote to the party that opposes any peace with Israel in January 2006. Mahmoud Abbas, who has repeatedly said he rejects violence and endorses the two-state solution, legitimized Hamas' rejectionist alternative by entering into a power-sharing agreement with the group in the February 2007 Mecca accord. For Arab states - whose definition of courage is to endorse a vague offer of eventual peace with Israel that is fifteen years out of date, and then do virtually nothing to implement it - the Hamas victory should awaken them to the danger within. How did Hamas acquire the weapons it used to defeat Fatah? Through Egypt. How did Hamas acquire the funds it used to pay its foot soldiers? Through Arab donors (and Iranians, too). How did Hamas acquire the legitimacy to lay claim to leadership of the Palestinian people? Through Arab diplomacy (the Mecca accord). The U.S. should urge Israel to complete the process of disengagement that it began in 2005. Israel is alone in the world as being the only country responsible for providing food, water, and electricity to a political entity that daily lobs missiles against its citizens. This is madness. Israel should leave Egypt as Gaza's outlet to the world, with food, water, electricity, and other humanitarian goods flowing over the Gaza-Egypt border. Unless Israel takes such a step, Hamas will continue taking advantage of Israeli humanitarianism while lobbing missiles at Israel. We should not believe the simplistic logic that says the West Bank is totally controlled by Fatah while Gaza is totally supportive of Hamas; indeed, there is quite a lot of Hamas support in the West Bank, too. But Hamas has not succeeded in penetrating nearly as far in the West Bank primarily due to the active presence of the Israeli army. Ironically, the political horizon that some in the administration would like to talk about would raise premature hopes about the removal of precisely that factor that is the most important barrier to the spread of Hamas in the West Bank today. One of the most serious flaws in the original Oslo Accords was Israel's formal decision to consider the West Bank and Gaza a "single territory unit." These were, of course, territories that Israel occupied from two different countries, territories with no contiguity between them, territories with very different historical roots as well as populations with very different economies and socioeconomic characteristics. The de facto situation is that this situation has now ended. The writer is executive director of the Washington Institute.
2007-06-19 01:00:00
Full Article