Hamas could have moderated
America and Israel prevented this from happening.
Here’s a brief history of how the United States and Israel really bungled their relationship with Hamas, ensuring it would become the most radical, violent, and powerful version of itself possible. Specifically, if it weren’t for missteps by the United States and further antagonism by Israel in 2007, Hamas likely would have moderated and eventually recognized Israel and rejected violence. My argument hinges on three key pieces of evidence:
First, polling data from March 2006, just over two months after the Palestinian elections that Hamas won, showed that 75% of Palestinians wanted Hamas to negotiate peace with Israel. This suggests that Palestinians largely didn’t want to resolve the conflict through violence; they wanted a peaceful resolution with two states.1 They voted for Hamas not because it wanted to destroy Israel but because they viewed Fatah as corrupt and wanted a change in government. Because of this, there would have been public pressure on the Hamas government to moderate. Despite Hamas’s soft authoritarianism, Gazans could have influenced their government through protests and civil disobedience, as Tunisians, Egyptians, and other Arabs would go on to do in 2011 under their authoritarian regimes. Also, if this peace-supporting supermajority of Palestinians had endured, Hamas would have had much more trouble recruiting militants simply due to a smaller pool of candidates.
Unfortunately, the three fourths of Palestinians who were hopeful for and supportive of peace were let down by an Israel (and America) intent on war. The Israeli government continued its illegal settlement program—adding 7,000-13,000 new settlers to Palestinian land between 2006 and 2007—in plain defiance of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel also maintained its economic blockade of the strip, which was deemed illegal in 2007 by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights due to its disastrous humanitarian consequences. The message this sent to Palestinians was: “We don’t care if you want peace. We have all the power, and America will let us do what we want. Go ahead and be peaceful or be violent: it won’t change our behaviour.” This is a really dumb message to send if you want to see your opponents moderate their behaviour.
Meanwhile, America was meddling in internal Palestinian politics: George Bush, after calling for democratic elections with Hamas as a contending party, decided that he was unhappy with the election result (Hamas had won). So he covertly instigated a Palestinian civil war, the Battle of Gaza, and funnelled weapons to Fatah via Egypt so it could overthrow the Hamas-Fatah unity government (which was led by Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, as prime minister). This backfired and resulted in Hamas taking over full control of the Gaza Strip. The message this sent to Hamas was: “Even if you try to govern from the middle by allying with our preferred party, Fatah, which recognizes Israel, we will try to destroy you.”
Predictably, by 2008, Palestinian support for recognizing Israel and creating a two-state solution had fallen to 55%.
Second, à propos that unity government I mentioned, there are some more lessons to be learned. It was born of negotiations in Saudi Arabia that produced the Mecca Agreement, a proposal for a Palestinian unity government. The agreement kept Ismail Haniyeh in charge, but many important posts were to be filled by Fatah members. Crucially, the job of foreign minister was given to a reform-minded moderate, Ziad Abu-Amr, who was ideologically closer to Fatah than Hamas (he went on to be Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s deputy prime minister in 2013). Hamas even agreed to respect past agreements between Israel and the PLO (namely the Oslo Accords), which de facto means recognizing Israel’s existence. America demanded that Hamas openly recognize Israel, something that Hamas had always been forcefully against, which all but guaranteed that the Mecca Agreement would fail.
One wonders why America insisted on this if its intention was to bring democracy, stability, and peace to Palestine and Israel (of course, we know this was not George Bush’s goal, since he was orchestrating a civil war while Hamas and Fatah were negotiating). The PLO once swore to destroy Israel. Over time, it moderated and came to recognize Israel. Hamas could have done the same. Moreover, a country or political party doesn’t need to recognize Israel to make peace with it. Saudi Arabia is at peace with Israel and even cooperates with it on security and still hasn’t recognized the Jewish state. So it seems that Israel and America preferred a violently fractured Palestine to a unified one that respected the Oslo Accords.
Third, despite all the Israeli and American antagonism in 2007 and beyond, in its 2017 charter, Hamas apprehensively voiced support for a two-state solution, showing that it still had the capacity for moderation and peace:
Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
These two sentences are contradictory. One seems to demand the destruction of Israel; one seems to accept Israel’s existence as a matter of practicality. Hamas was trying to thread the needle of maintaining its long-held anti-Zionist stance with the reality on the ground: Israel wasn’t going anywhere. So which sentence reflects Hamas’s true beliefs and intentions in 2017? It’s not clear. I like to think of this in the same way I regard religious texts. They contain many contradictory statements. The Hebrew Bible commands the Israelites to commit genocide (Deuteronomy 7 and 20) but also commands them to “Turn from evil and do good. Seek peace and pursue it,” (Psalms 34:15). Jesus said “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me,” (Luke 19:27). He also said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44). So which is it?
Believers pick and choose how to interpret their texts based on the material conditions they are faced with. Basically, if they see themselves in non-zero-sum (win-win) relationships with a given group of people, they’ll be generous and peaceful toward them. If they see themselves in a zero-sum, winner-take-all relationship, they’ll rely on the more horrific passages of their sacred texts. At least, this is the argument Robert Wright makes convincingly in his book The Evolution of God. As he puts it:
When people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with other people—see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose—they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.
My hunch is that if Israel and America had embraced the possibility of a moderate Palestinian unity government in 2007 and worked had to create to win-win dynamic where the fortunes of the Israeli and Palestinian nations were clearly correlated and codependent, Hamas’s behaviour would have reflected the spirit of the second sentence (the two-state solution endorsement) and less that of the first sentence (the from-river-to-the-sea endorsement).
If I were writing to a largely Palestinian audience rather than a Western one, I would have emphasized different historical mistakes. Just as there are morally condemnable things that Israel and America have done in the past that made Oct. 7 more likely, there are awful things Hamas has done that are morally condemnable (namely the Oct. 7 attack). So, yes, I am picking on Israel here. (I also view Israel and America as having more of a responsibility to solve the conflict because they are vastly more powerful than Fatah or Hamas.) If my blog gains a significant following in Bethlehem or Rafah, I’ll write that other essay.
Some people, like Alan Dershowitz, will attempt to justify Israel’s killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians by claiming those civilians voted for Hamas.
“Remember that the citizens of Gaza, these innocent civilians who so many people are shedding tears about, they voted for Hamas in the last election. . . so when you look at these civilian deaths, you have to ask yourself a question: how many of them really are civilians?”
Of course, the majority of Palestinians alive today weren’t able to vote in those elections. And Hamas only won 44% of the vote in 2006. Those who supported Hamas in 2006 largely did so for reasons other than supporting eternal war with Israel; Hamas didn’t run on the platform “We will do Oct. 7 eighteen years from now.”