Four days after Israel halted its war in Gaza, Hamas decided it was time for victory celebrations. In the past, thousands would gather for elaborate rallies with singing male bands, abseiling commandos and bombastic speeches. This time the mood was different.
Rather than risk one poorly attended central demonstration, Hamas held separate rallies in different towns. In Gaza City, barely a few hundred tired-looking sympathisers walked behind a truck as slogans were reeled off through a loudspeaker. Most Gazans were still digging their dead from the rubble and trying to rebuild their destroyed homes with plastic sheets and duct tape.
Despite more than 1 200 people killed and 21 000 homes wholly or partly destroyed, Hamas leaders believe they have won a victory against the might of the Israeli military. This deep inner conviction is shaping the movement’s decision making.
Hamas officials boast of comparisons with previous Israeli wars, including the 1967 six-day war. “Israel defeated four Arab armies in six days. We lasted 22 days,” said Ahmed Yusuf, an adviser in Hamas’s foreign ministry. Walid Mudallal, who is close to Hamas and dean of the Khan Yunis branch of the Islamic University, said: “Victory is to the one who survives after 22 days under this hellfire. It is unprecedented, unexpected … the one who emerged stronger is Hamas.”
Hamas’s internal deliberations are hard to decipher.
However, several accounts suggest that over the past two years the movement’s hardliners have come to dominate, and more moderate or pragmatic figures have been pushed to the sidelines. The result is that even though Hamas is offering a year-long ceasefire with Israel it appears no closer to making any major compromises — particularly on the key issue of reconciliation with the rival Palestinian faction, Fatah.
A year ago Hamas, under pressure from Israel’s punitive economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, said it was willing to hold talks with Fatah without conditions.
Now Hamas’s most senior figures are insisting on new, deal-breaking conditions before talks start.
Osama Hamdan, a Beirut-based member of the Hamas political bureau, who is close to the leader Khaled Meshal, said on Sunday that a future united government must abandon peace talks with Israel in favour of the armed struggle, and should halt security co-operation with the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank. “It’s time for us to talk about a reconciliation based on a resistance programme to liberate the territory and regain rights,” he said.
In part, that sentiment echoes the popular mood in Gaza, where people are so appalled at Israel’s devastating attacks that they are in no mood to cheer a return to peace talks, especially given the striking failure of the Annapolis peace process over the past year.
Yet all Gazans are desperate for the lifting of the blockade, which prevents all exports and imports apart from limited amounts of aid. Few can see it happening without Hamas at least agreeing a deal with Fatah that would see the West Bank-based group return to take some security responsibility in Gaza, particularly at the crossing points.
That intransigence on the part of Hamas has brought some careful criticism in Gaza. “Declaring victory while the Palestinians are bleeding and in a catastrophe was not respected by the Palestinians,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Gaza’s al-Azhar University. “If Hamas is able to end the siege and reopen the borders between Gaza and the outside world, then I think they can claim victory without any problem. But I think it’s complicated.”
Israeli officials insist the blockade will not end without Hamas releasing Gilad Shalit, the soldier captured in 2006, and agreeing a unity government. Abusada said Hamas was not ready for that. “They are not interested in national dialogue. Their conditions don’t make any sense except that they are trying to avoid any serious national dialogue with Fatah,” he said.
“Since Hamas took over Gaza its leaders like to be in power, like to be in control. They think: why share power with Fatah?”
There have long been differences of opinion within Hamas. At the time of the Palestinian elections in 2006, a minority argued that Hamas should seek not to win the vote but to become a party of opposition, as a way of exercising “self-control”. However, most others wanted to take the victory as it came, even though it brought international isolation. In June 2007, the hardliners came to the fore, seizing full control of Gaza and ousting Fatah.
Hamas is run through three secret councils, known as shura, in Gaza, the West Bank and among Hamas leaders in exile. A council of Hamas prisoners is sometimes consulted. Elections in the Gaza shura last year reportedly brought new faces and hardliners into power at the expense of more pragmatic voices.
Israeli officials make a lot of these apparent divisions, though Gazans say they are limited. Reconciliation must come before anything else, said Sayyd Abu Mosameh, a scholar of Islamic law and MP, who was Hamas commander for Gaza two decades ago. “I hope for Hamas to be not hardline, but to be moderate.” – guardian.co.uk