In this new landscape, everyone is in the dark. After Hamas won an enormous victory that shocked even them, all the players in the Middle East conflict are stumbling around, unsure how to negotiate the new terrain. No one knows quite what to do.
Proof of that came in the form of Monday’s statement from the quartet of world powers who preside over what is still laughably referred to as the Middle East peace process. Translated, the diplomatese boiled down to a plea for time. Everyone wants a pause for breath, to see what happens in the Israeli elections on March 28, to see what Hamas does with its parliamentary majority.
Hamas are not exactly in a hurry to start governing either: they antici-pated (maybe even wanted) to form a large opposition bloc rather than be given the hospital pass of actually administering the Palestinian Authority. To have responsibility for daily Palestinian life — yet, because under Israeli occupation, little power to do the job — is a thankless, if not impossible task. Hamas are talking of a ”period of transition”; they moot a coalition with Fatah, the party they defeated. They too crave delay.
This stunned paralysis on all sides is down to more than just the shock of the new. It’s also a function of the fact that there seem to be no good options, for anybody. Imagine a chess game in which every possible path is blocked: the players stare at their pieces, bite their nails and see only stalemate.
Take United States President George W Bush. If he recognises Hamas, he flatly contradicts his global war on terror, since both the US and the European Union have long branded Hamas a terrorist organisation. But if he doesn’t recognise Hamas, he flatly contradicts his global campaign for democracy, since Hamas just won a clear majority in precisely the kind of free election Bush demands for the whole Arab world. He either, by his own logic, legitimates terror or he admits that he is offering only a Henry Ford kind of democracy: you can have whatever colour car you like, so long as it’s black.
Europe is in a spot that is not much better. It can’t keep up its financial aid, because that would be giving money to a terrorist organisation. But if it turns off the EU tap, Palestinian life will deteriorate even further. Perhaps pro-Western Arab states, such as Egypt and Jordan, might fill the financial vacuum — but what if Syria and Iran get there first?
In this frozen confusion, people are clutching at past experience to see what lessons that might teach. In a round of conversations this week with those involved, including a senior Hamas figure, everyone has come up with their own historical parallel.
First up has been the direct comparison of Hamas today with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) of three decades ago. They too were diplomatically shunned as a terror organisation that refused to recognise Israel. In reality, the PLO was on a journey that would culminate in the 1988 acceptance of Israel alongside a Palestinian state, eventual negotiations and the Oslo accords five years later. ”Give them time,” said one veteran Palestinian negotiator. ”It took us 40 years to reach that position.”
You can see this parallel as either cheery or gloomy. Optimists will be heartened by Hamas’s clear declarations that they are ready to accept a state on the post-1967 territories, if not as a final settlement then as a long-term interim solution. If they are willing to negotiate on that basis, there would be a great advantage: unlike the Fatah suits, they would command the backing of the Palestinian street for any peace deal they might sign.
The pessimist might marvel that, after 30 years of tears and bloodshed, we are right back where we were. We will have to go through the same old dance all over again: coded statements from the Palestinian side, tentative back channels from the Israelis, nudging from Washington, years of diplomacy — and just to get to the point that could and should have been reached in 1993.
Israelis in particular should be rueing their country’s failure to seize the opportunity the first time around. They had, in Fatah and the PLO, a Palestinian leadership who had already made this long journey. But instead of stretching every sinew to make the 1993 accommodation work, Israel undermined it at every turn. It carried on building the settle-ments, it kept up the checkpoints, curfews and land confiscations.
In the past year, it has made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Fatah leadership look as if they had been duped. The message Israel sent to the Palestinian electorate was stark: peacemaking and moderation do not work. The Palestinians heard it loud and clear — and voted for Hamas. Pessimists will say it could take another decade or more for Hamas to go through the Fatah process. If and when they do, will Israel miss the opportunity again?
The second favoured parallel of the hour is with Northern Ireland, with Hamas in the role of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This comparison could be useful, if only for those Middle England audiences of BBC TV’s Question Time and BBC Radio’s Any Questions who last week seemed outraged that Israel was not rushing into a warm embrace with Hamas.
They might recall how unwilling the British public were to deal with republicans when the IRA were still fully engaged in armed struggle. Gerry Adams could rack up as many votes as he liked in West Belfast, it made no difference: Brits weren’t allowed to hear his voice, let alone speak with him. We should bear that in mind next time we instruct foreigners to talk to people they regard as terrorists.
The trouble with the Northern Ireland comparison is that today’s republicans have renounced violence and are nearly a decade into a ceasefire — and still unionism’s biggest party won’t talk to them. On that scale, an Israeli accord with Hamas is years away. I was also told that Hamas will never, ever disarm: ”The legitimacy of their resistance is embedded too deep in Palestinian society.” If decommissioning held back peace in Ulster for 10 years, what hope for Israel-Palestine?
No, the more likely future is one of what the Palestinian analyst and sometime negotiator Ahmad Khalidi calls ”parallel unilateralism”: each side will make their own moves, independent of the other. That will suit Israel, which has long insisted that ”there is no partner” on the Palestinian side. If they could say that of the compliant Mahmoud Abbas, they won’t soften for Hamas. Assuming Ehud Olmert wins in March, and is strong enough, he will continue Ariel Sharon’s work — and stage further unilateral pullouts from the West Bank.
That will leave Hamas to make solo moves of its own. They might simply implement their key election promises: to clean out corruption, to extend their health and education services, to improve Palestinian daily life. Or, to put it more grandly, they might engage in state-building. Which brings us to perhaps the unlikeliest historic parallel of all.
Hamas’s best bet might be to learn not from Fatah or the IRA, but from the early Zionist movement. Living under colonial military rule from the 1920s to the 1940s, it focused its energies on building the institutions of statehood: schools, bureaucracy, even an embryonic national health service. When independence came in 1948, they were ready. — Â