HAMAS: DECLINE AND FALL. (AND POSTSCRIPT: RISE?)

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

WASHINGTON POST

Outsiders sometimes see Hamas as something like an American big-city machine that trades jobs and welfare benefits in return for political loyalty and votes — though a machine with an armed wing.

Hamas does have an armed wing, and other parts of the organization attempt to provide some social services, but the number of Palestinians who benefit from those services is small. And it’s dwarfed by those who get assistance from the Palestinian government, international aid bodies and nongovernmental organizations. This fact is missed by outsiders who often mistake anything Islamic for Hamas.
Hamas’s support from Palestinian civilians, when it comes, stems from other things. For example, the movement poses as uncompromising on Palestinian rights and uncorrupted by money and power. The political and diplomatic solutions, such as the Oslo peace process, offered by other factions such as Fatah seem meaningless to most Palestinians, who have grown cynical about their leaders’ ability to deliver.

The image of Hamas as an uncorrupt movement unconcerned with the trappings of power grew outdated once the group stepped into power after its 2006 election victory. Israel and Hamas both realized back in 2007 that holing the movement up in Gaza was a bit of a trap, forcing Hamas to take on responsibility for sewage, schooling and zoning.

But earlier this year, Hamas resigned all its cabinet positions and agreed to surrender political leadership of the Gaza Strip.  Hamas has many headaches to deal with now but also a bit more freedom to maneuver. With the decision to stop being a government as well as a movement, Hamas’s reputation may begin to recover. And some of its leaders may be saying now: What better way to start the effort than to return to the movement’s roots in armed resistance?

In all kinds of ways, recent opinion polling shows that the majority of Palestinians back positions that Hamas rejects regarding diplomacy and resistance. Hamas remains more hard-line than the public it seeks to lead, and surveys also show that the group would have tremendous trouble repeating its 2006 election win. But, elections are unlikely any time soon. And the despair among Palestinians is so deep, the numbers do not look much better for any leader or faction; at this point Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seen as isolated, aloof and having spent all his political capital on a failed peace process.

Yes, Hamas surrendered its cabinet positions to people appointed by Abbas. And yes, Hamas is taking a beating and its activists are being driven underground. But its credentials as the movement that does not bend and dares to take on Israel are being burnished among much of the audience it cares about.
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 As a movement, Hamas offers resistance — attacking civilians, launching rockets and ransoming captives — but it cannot field a military force that could face Israel on the battlefield. Indeed, all the ground combat is happening in Gaza.
However, more than Israel’s existence is being threatened. The abduction and murder of three Israeli teens last month may or may not have been a Hamas operation — but the event captured the attention of the Israeli public, and the Israeli government reacted as if Hamas were responsible. While the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system is debated — officials boast that it intercepts 90 percent of Hamas’s missiles — large parts of the Israeli population now feel within Hamas’s reach as the range of its rockets creeps higher.
Hamas may never come close to vanquishing Israel on the battlefield, but changes in its capabilities — tunnels, abductions, missiles and even a drone — continue to make Israelis nervous and force them to react.

Smoke trails rockets launched from Gaza towards Israel on Tuesday. Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images        

N.Y. TIMES

When war between Israel and Hamas broke out two weeks ago, the Palestinian militant group was so hamstrung, politically, economically and diplomatically, that its leaders appeared to feel they had nothing to lose.

Hamas took what some here call “option zero,” gambling that it could shift the balance with its trump cards: its arms and militants.

“There were low expectations in terms of its performance against the recent round of Israeli incursions. It’s been exceeding all expectations,” said Abdullah Al-Arian, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar who is currently in Washington. “And it’s likely to come out in a far better position than in the last three years, and maybe the last decade.”

 

Hamas had been struggling. The turmoil in the region meant it lost one of its main sponsors, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom it broke with over his brutal fight against a Sunni Muslim-led insurgency, and weakened its alliance with Iran. It lost support in Egypt when the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted and replaced with a military-backed government hostile to Hamas.

An underground look at Hamas’s tunnels into Israel.

Video Credit By Carrie Halperin and Sofia Perpetua on Publish Date July 22, 2014. Image CreditJim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency                           

[ Daily Beast:In 2006, when the Israelis attacked Gaza in the south, Hezbollah started launching rockets attacking Israel from the north and kidnapped Israeli soldiers there, leading to a brief but brutal war in which Hezbollah guerrillas fought the vaunted Israel Defense Forces to a standstill.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah [believes]weighing in on the side of Hamas would invite massive Israeli retaliation and force a replay of the 2006 war that, this time around, Hezbollah would be likely to lose because Nasrallah’s forces are stretched so thin on so many fronts defending its allies—and Tehran’s—in Damascus and now in Baghdad.
The Hamas leadership had worried this day might come. It warned Hezbollah of what it saw as the distraction of intervening full-tilt in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. ]

N.Y. TIMES (Cont'd)

Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political wing and a former health minister in Gaza, acknowledged that relations have soured with Iran and the Arab world, but said that it could survive.

 Unemployment in Gaza is around 50 percent, having risen steeply since Israel pulled out its troops and settlers in 2005 and severely tightened border restrictions.

Hamas appeared powerless to end the near-blockade of its border by Israel and more recently Egypt. It could not even pay its 40,000 government workers their salaries.
Naim said, “Gaza is a big problem for everybody, for Hamas, for Fatah, for Israel, shortages of water, housing and medicine, a population explosion, growing extremism."

The group was so handicapped that it agreed to enter into a pact with its rival party, Fatah, to form a new government. But that seemed only to make matters worse, sowing division within its own ranks, with some in the military wing angry at the concession, while providing none of the economic relief Hamas had hoped for.

When Hamas sent a barrage of rockets into Israel, simmering hostilities, and back and forth strikes, erupted into war.

At first, when Hamas rockets were being intercepted mainly by Israel’s Iron Dome system as Israel hit Gaza with devastating force, the group strove to persuade its supporters that it was having enough impact on Israel to wrest concessions: Its radio stations blared fictional reports about Israeli casualties.

 

But as it wore on, the conflict revealed that Hamas’s secret tunnel network leading into Israel was far more extensive, and sophisticated, than previously known. It also was able to inflict some pain on Israel, allowing Hamas to declare success even as it drew a devastating and crushing response. Its fighters were able to infiltrate Israel multiple times during an intensive Israeli ground invasion. Its militants have killed at least 27 Israeli soldiers and claim to have captured an Israeli soldier who was reported missing in battle, a potentially key bargaining chip.

And on Tuesday its rockets struck a blow to Israel — psychological and economic — by forcing a halt in international flights. Hamas once again looks strong in the eyes of its supporters, and has shown an increasingly hostile region that it remains a force to be reckoned with.   

A home that was destroyed by a Hamas missile near Ben Gurion International Airport in Yahud, near Tel Aviv. Credit Gideon Markowicz/ European  Pressphoto   Agency        

But Hamas’s gains could be short-lived if it does not deliver Gazans a better life. Israel says its severe restrictions on what can be brought into Gaza, such as construction materials, are needed because Hamas poses a serious security threat, and the discovery of the tunnels has served only to validate that concern.

So far, at least 620 Palestinians have died, around 75 percent of them civilians, according to the United Nations, including more than 100 children. Gazans did not get a vote when Hamas chose to escalate conflict, nor did they when Hamas selected areas near their homes, schools and mosques to fire rockets from the densely populated strip. At the family house of four boys killed last week by an Israeli strike while playing on a beach, some wailing women cursed Hamas along with Israel.

 

 It is also unclear whether, when the fighting ends, Hamas will have the same kind of foreign support it has had in the past to rebuild its arsenal or its infrastructure; Egypt, under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has destroyed hundreds of the tunnels that were used to bring in arms, money and supplies, and has kept the proper border crossing mostly closed.

 

 In exchange for a cease-fire, Hamas is demanding Israel and Egypt open their borders to end the restrictions on the movement of people and goods — the most immediate issue for ordinary Gazans. It is also asking for the release of prisoners — but avoiding the deeper political issues of the conflict.

Mr. Shaban said that Hamas, confronted in recent years with the often conflicting requirements of its roles as an armed resistance group and a governing party, for once was “being clever enough to demand conditions that are in touch with the people. The people are realistic.”

 

Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006, but an international boycott prevented it from governing. It returned to power in Gaza in 2007 after ousting the Fatah-led government by force.

Hamas overreached, Mr. Shaban said, more than doubling Gaza’s administrative budget to more than $800 million — not including the financing of the militant Izzedine al-Qassam brigades.

But as the recent fight with Israel has revealed, Hamas was importing tons of cement — desperately needed for Gazan schools and houses and construction jobs — to reinforce the tunnels it built to infiltrate Israel and hide its weapons.

“They have different priorities,” Mr. Shaban said of the military wing. “Don’t send rockets while we don’t have milk for our children.”

But, he added, “do we stop struggling with Israel? I believe in peace, a two-state solution, I never liked conflict. But Israel did not leave us anything. What Hamas is doing is partially supported by the people.”