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A Short History of Fatah and Hamas
By Zachary Thacher / January 15, 2009
So many friends have been asking me about what’s happening in Gaza, and who the actors are, that I thought I’d shed some light on one side of this complex conflict. This is a short history of Fatah, the group opposed to Hamas in what is essentially a Palestinian civil war currently interrupted by the Israel-Gaza war.
Fatah is the main political wing within the PLO, which Yasir Arafat founded in 1964 as a group that relied on terror tactics to advance its goals of creating a Palestinian entity in what had been the British Mandate, and thereby destroying the Jewish state. Fatah is an Arabic word which recalls the first burst of Islamic expansion in the 8th century CE, which is when Islam effectively took over what we now consider the Middle East, including north Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Since it’s founding the PLO attacked Israeli civilians, non-Israeli Jews, and tried to take over neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon so they could launch a war against Israel and become a regional power. It considers itself a leftist liberation group which, in this part of the world, means that while being Muslim, it is not religious in nature, or motivated by the jihadi worldview of Hamas, Iran, Al Qaeda, though it has often played to Islamic themes, particularly to drum up domestic support.
By the late 1960s the PLO grew in stature and tried to take over Jordan in a slow-moving guerrilla war. The Jordanian government violently responded and in September, 1970 it killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in what became known as Black September. The PLO was expelled to Lebanon, during which Syria killed thousands of Palestinians as the various actors in the area — Christians, secularists, Sunnis and Shias — jockeyed for power. The PLO arrival in Lebanon and attacks on other Lebanese factions helped destabilize the country and plunge it into the civil war that would last until the mid-1990′s. In 1978, the PLO committed one of the worst terror attacks in Israeli history, known today as the Coastal Road Massacre, prompting an Israeli military incursion into southern Lebanon to push the PLO off the Israeli border. In the years that followed, taking advantage of the disorder of the Lebanese civil war, the PLO continued its attacks, prompting Israel in 1982 to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to permanently remove the PLO. The 1982 war resulted in a Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon with no settlements until 1985, when the IDF withdrew to a smaller "security zone" along its border with Lebanon, which was eventually abandoned by Prime Minister Ehud Barack in 2000. Which is when Hizbullah — a radical Shia group created and funded by Iran — took control. It now uses the area as a base of operations against Israel, Christians, Druze, and Sunni Arabs on behalf of the Iranian government.
The Israeli war in Lebanon in 1982 was successful in meeting its goal — it forced the PLO into exile in Tunis, far from the action. Soon after, the first intifadah started, encouraged by a motley crew of local PLO militants, various other actors and a new, deeply religious group, Hamas, in a bid to "shake off" Israeli control of territories it had captured from Egypt and Jordan in 1967. Hamas was a new group formed in 1987 that sees itself as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — a theocratic radical Sunni group started in Egypt. Some articles claim that Israel played a role in Hamas’ creation as a wedge against Fatah, but it seems unlikely considering that Hamas has an even bleaker view of Jewish sovereignty than Fatah, and for Israel’s reliance on a secular Egypt as its southern neighbor. If there was any collaboration between Israel and Hamas, it must have been tactical and short-lived.
The intifadah was rag tag and chaotic for both the Israelis seeking military control of the territories, and the Palestinian fighters seeking to dislodge it and take over Israel. During this intifadah most of world opinion in the Western countries and movements began to shift away from Israel, perhaps due to the Hizbollah terror attacks on US Marines in Lebanon in 1983 which horrified Americans and caused us to withdraw our troops until the Gulf War, perhaps out of sympathy for a struggle that looked familiar to race-guilty Americans, who came to associate Palestinians with blacks and Jews with whites in the civil rights movement. And perhaps when Europeans began to see themselves as less guilty for the Holocaust since the Jewish State was using military force to suppress a nearby population. The thinking goes that by castigating Israel for supposed war crimes, Europeans exonerated their sins.
Ironically, it was Israel — now faring more and more poorly in world opinion due to the long intifadah — who invited the Fatah leadership back to the West Bank in what became the Oslo negotiations in 1994, to both end the intifadah and to come to some kind of bi- or multilateral peace settlement that was hoped to transform an entire region marked by ecnomic stagnation, ignorance and a rising ideological fanatacism. At least, this is what the world leaders and commentators and the Left were purporting. This restored Arafat’s Fatah movement to the West Bank after many decades of exile.
During the mid-to-late 1990s Fatah/PLO cemented its leadership in the West Bank (which represents roughly 50% of the British Mandate if you exclude the mostly uninhabitable Negev desert) and Hamas made huge in-roads to the much more religiously minded Gazan clans. Israel debated interally whether or not it wanted to go through with the accords and a year after an orthodox extremist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu rose to power, but over a divided country.
The biggest outcome of the Oslo negotiations was the transformation of the Fatah-led PLO — hated by Israel, Shia Arabs, the Jordanians and Syrians — into the much more benign sounding "Palestinian Authority" as a symbolic first step towards Palestinian statehood. Jordan also signed a public peace treaty with Israel, but the two countries had been at peace in private for decades because the Jordanian government needs a strong Israel to keep it from being taken over by Islamic radicals or political terrorists, like the PLO attacks way back in the late ’60s. It’s an ironic reversal from Jordan’s anti-Jewish belligerence since 1948, but that’s par for the course in the shifting alliances of a post-colonial Middle East.Â
Despite internal arguments in Israel, most seemed to believe that a peace deal was within grasp between the State of Israel and Fatah/PLO/PA. I was there in August 2000 and can attest to the sentiment by various religious, liberal secular and many, many center-right Israelis. It seemed to be a fait accompli, but, in the fall of 2000, Arafat voided the final rounds of Oslo-inspired negotiations with Bill Clinton and then PM Ehud Barack by launching a new intifadah. Arafat called it the Al Aqsa Intifadah, pegged to the news story of famed general and politician Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but more directly related to the collapsed peace talks which Clinton publicly blamed on Arafat, who had become a close political partner and most frequent foreign guest of the White House.
There is still no bi-lateral settlement with Fatah, but in-coming President Barack Obama will undoubtedly push for Israel to sign a peace treaty. With who is anyone’s guess. The current Fatah leadership lacks Arafat’s leadership qualities.
Fatah, the majority faction within the Palestinian Authority, orchestrated the second intifadah in 2000 in part to push the Israelis towards greater territorial concessions, in part to restore its credibility in an increasingly religious Islamic world that decried its partnership with America and Israel.
After suffering through three years of constant suicide attacks, Israel eventually fought back in a massive military operation in 2003. This destroyed Fatah/PLO/PA governing infrastructure, reversed much of the Oslo negotiated military withdrawals from huge sectors of the territory, and began the creation of a huge security fence to thwart suicide attackers from the massive boundary between Israel proper and the West Bank. (The New York Times and other media associations call this the "pre-1967 border" but what they mean to say is the "1949 armistice" line between Israel and Jordan.) By then any goodwill the PA had had in America was now spent, especially when intelligence revealed that Fatah had stolen most of their international aid money, rigged elections to stay in power, and supported suicide attacks against Israeli (and invariably American) civilians in gruesome competition with their Hamas rivals. Clinton, was out, Bush was in, and no one in American mainstream politics trusted Fatah. After 9/11, plans for peace grew even dimmer. And then Arafat died, leaving Fatah without its charismatic founder.
Israel decided that if it couldn’t have a bi-lateral negotiation with a now compromised Fatah that had spent its last political credit with the second intifadah , then it would unilaterally withdraw from the territories and wipe its hands clean. World opinion favored this move as a postive gesture to a mostly leaderless Palestinian society.
The first step would be to leave Gaza because it’s further from Israeli population centers, had fewer settlers, and less Jewish and Christian religious associations, than say, Jericho or Hebron do in the West Bank. The step after would be to leave most of the West Bank except for settlements on the outskirts of Jerusalem. To accomplish this Ariel Sharon founded a new political party, won elections and in 2005 he left Gaza. The Israeli perspective was to wait and see what would happen there. If Gazans were peaceful, then the West Bank would be next. Hamas won them, and for the first time ever Fatah was in a new, untenable position — it may lose power over the Palestinian movement it had created and controlled for over fifty years. And it would lose it to Hamas, in elections brokered by the Americans. The difficult of the situation, never mind the irony, created a civil war for the first time within the Palestinian movement, and in the end, Hamas seized control of Gaza and Fatah was left with the West Bank. Hamas rocket fire into Israel began in 2005, before Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, but after the group’s complete takeover of the security apparatus in Gaza, the rocket fire intensified until the six-month, Egypt-brokered ceasefire of 2007. (For information on what transpired during that ceasefire, see here.)
At this time of writing, during the Israel-Gaza war of 2009, Israel wants to cripple Hamas and to install Fatah, Israel’s former foe, to rule Gaza in yet another strange reversal in Middle Eastern history. This, then, would be the second time Israel will have sponsored Fatah’s revival and control over a rudderless population. Critics of Palestinian sovereignty point out that to become a state one needs contiguous land, visionary leaders and internal cohesion among the populace. Currently the Palestinians have none of the above.Â
It’s hard to imagine how an incoming Democratic administration will change any of these facts since Hamas is a theocractic nightmare which counts Iran as its friend, Fatah is a diminished kleptocracy and the Israeli population will pull to the Right in the next round of parlimentary elections after feeling that the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake.
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Here‘s a newer article on Israel’s relationship with Hamas back in the early days.
 Then Hamas marked the end of the ceasefire by shooting sixty missiles a day at Israel, even as it complained that it wouldn’t shoot if Israel just opened up the border crossings. This is a twisted logic, but there you have it. - Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4th; while I certainly don’t think that justified launching rockets at citizens, it’s interesting that you focus on how "Hamas marked the end of the ceasefire" without mentioning how exactly the ceasefire came to be ended. Also, the twisted logic of "we’ll shoot until you do as we say" is um, also the logic of the Israeli army. They launched x number of missiles a day, even while complaining they wouldn’t shoot if Hamas just stopped launching their own rockets. Like Israel, Hamas applied force to emphasize a point about what they wanted. Either the logic works in both cases, or it’s twisted in both cases.
Israel had limited options. The first cease fire was over and it was under attack. It couldn’t create a peace treaty with Hamas because Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel, never mind sitting down at negotiations with them. Israel couldn’t fulfill Hamas’ goals of economic integration through the border crossings since that would enhance a regime pledged to Israel’s destruction. (Hamas has a history of sneaking in armaments and cash in ambulances and under other humanitarian cover.)
Again, nice of you to ignore how exactly the ceasefire came to be over. Moving on though, the fact that Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel is a terrible reason not to create a peace treaty: that’s why a peace treaty is necessary! And negotiations are a far smaller step than a peace treaty, so your "never mind" doesn’t really work; how else do you think the current ceasesfire was engineered other than by sitting down at negotiations with Hamas? If Hamas can’t be negotiated with, then you have to explain the summer ceasefire. The blockade did not keep weapons out; those smuggling tunnels are back in operation, or will be soon, and they will only grow under an Israeli blockade. Hamas is going to smuggle in those weapons no matter what. Period. Sorry, it sucks, I know, but that’s economics. Those tunnels are always going to be profitable, and that means someone is going to run them. Not stifling Gaza’s economy might at least have reduced the desire of Gazans for Hamas to do anything with those weapons.
However, you’ll note that since summer of 2006 Hizbullah hasn’t fired a missile into northern Israel, and their leader said if he knew then what he knows now, he never would have provoked Israel with the kidnappings in the first place.
Might teaches a powerful lesson. Mess with us, and you lose your heads.
Hizbullah fired missiles during the Gaza fiasco. Moreover, given that the reason for the Lebanon war was to get back the captured soldiers, and that those soldiers weren’t returned until two years after the offensive, and in a prisoner swap (what the war was supposed to replace the need for), I have a hard time seeing how Israel "won" in Lebanon. And it’s not just liberal diaspora Jews like me who think this. That Hizbullah has not devoted all of its attention to Israel doesn’t mean they haven’t grown more powerful: remember how they turned on the Lebanese government, defeated them militarily, and earned themselves veto power and a cabinet minister in the government? Despite the 2006 war, Hizbullah was still strong enough to face the Lebanese army in a showdown and come out on top. This does not sound like defeat to me. The idea that Arabs might not know that Israel will respond to provocation mercilessly is ridiculous; do you think any Gazans were unaware of the potential repercussions before Israel’s invasion? Of course not. And they’ll be just as aware of the repercussions the next time this shit happens, and the same people will justify the war by saying that "we’re teaching them a lesson". Look, the lesson’s been taught, they learned it, they don’t care. It’s not working.
Even more than that, watch this video of Mark Regev claiming that "success is freeing the population of southern Israel from the fear of an incoming Hamas rocket". Do you think southern Israelis can rid themselves of that fear now? Do you think Sderot will never see a rocket again? Because I don’t, and so I don’t think this war was successful, on the Israeli government’s own criteria.
 And now that Gaza has been hit hard, it makes it much easier for Fatah (not my favorite organization) to see if it can correctly and justly distribute rebuidling funds to make Gaza more like the West Bank — a semi-peaceful neighbor to Israel.
I don’t really know how Fatah is going to take over in Gaza now, nor how they will have an easier time turning it into the West Bank now that it has been bombed to hell. If anything, bombings like these make the West Bank more likely to turn into Gaza.
Finally, As any armchair historian knows, when you’re under attack and need to destroy your enemy, your one real advantage in a military confrontation is 1) surprise and 2) the ability to dictate the terms of engagement.
I would dispute that being under attack means that you necessarily need to destroy your enemy. Sometimes, engaging in a military confrontation at all is ceding the advantage.
See, isn’t actually discussing this more fun?
Not sure if we’ll ever see eye to eye on this, and I gather that you are ineed a liberal whereas I’m a hawk (regarding Israel, I consider myself a liberal in most other affairs), but here goes.
Israel had a foreign entity pledged to its destruction firing missiles at it for eight or so years. Even after a year-long ceasefire, this entity, Hamas, continued to gather more and more sophisticated weapons. Their state sponsor, Iran, represents an inexhaustible source of funding and weaponry because Iran, while poor, has tons and tons of oil. Hopefully any rational observer of the region can agree on these basic facts.
 Then Hamas marked the end of the ceasefire by shooting sixty missiles a day at Israel, even as it complained that it wouldn’t shoot if Israel just opened up the border crossings. This is a twisted logic, but there you have it.Â
Israel had limited options. The first cease fire was over and it was under attack. It couldn’t create a peace treaty with Hamas because Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel, never mind sitting down at negotiations with them. Israel couldn’t fulfill Hamas’ goals of economic integration through the border crossings since that would enhance a regime pledged to Israel’s destruction. (Hamas has a history of sneaking in armaments and cash in ambulances and under other humanitarian cover.)
 As any armchair historian knows, when you’re under attack and need to destroy your enemy, your one real advantage in a military confrontation is 1) surprise and 2) the ability to dictate the terms of engagement.
Israel did what I think it had to do, and it did it well — except that the loss of civilians life was indeed horrific. However, you’ll note that since summer of 2006 Hizbullah hasn’t fired a missile into northern Israel, and their leader said if he knew then what he knows now, he never would have provoked Israel with the kidnappings in the first place.
Might teaches a powerful lesson. Mess with us, and you lose your heads.
I really don’t think it’s very complicated. And now that Gaza has been hit hard, it makes it much easier for Fatah (not my favorite organization) to see if it can correctly and justly distribute rebuidling funds to make Gaza more like the West Bank — a semi-peaceful neighbor to Israel. Why would Fatah be interested in being mostly peaceful? After operation Defensive Shield in 2003 it saw all of its infrastructure destroyed by Israel. They learned the lesson. Hopefully Gazans will too. Â
With all due respects, I wrote a history of Fatah and Hamas because I’m interested in a substantial historical understanding of the actors engaged in the current conflict. Playing ping-pong with you doesn’t enhance my claritity about the region, it’s just an old saw.
If you’re interested in discussing the nature of the Olso accords or how Hamas may wriggle out of the current cease-fire, I’m all ears. But the Liberal vs Hawkish back-and-forth — for me at least — only illuminates our disagreement, but not the issues themselves.
Peace,
Z
What you lack in common sense you make up for in garrulousness. Think short dude as you earnestly re-imagine the Middle East.
In other words, it’s a tough neighborhood. Or haven’t you noticed?Â
Do you really have any evidence for making such a statement? And who cares what a Syrian "politician" admits to? – This is my evidence, and here and here are more signs that this is not going to get Israel and Syria any closer to a peace deal. Syrian politicians still have to deal with the wider Arab world. They have to keep relations decent with all sorts of other states and powerful non-state actors; Syria cannot be talking to Israel while Gaza burns.
Look, IÂ realize you find the Arab outcry politically problematic, but
once the hostilities end what will Hamas have to show for it? There is
a point of diminishing returns when it comes to using victimhood and
national solidarity bred of enemy attack as the means for rallying
around a political party (see Republicans in America, ca. 2006 for
details). And I’m not certain Hamas were all that well-loved in Gaza to
begin with. Let’s accept that it’s just as much their
calculation that they will make political hay out of this. And in the
immediate and short-term future, they will. However, if they are not
able to use this event as a way to advance what they can deliver for
Gaza in the long-run, then that will further limit their ability to
be so damned immoderate while retaining their political relevance. – Yikes, big quote there. I think Hamas will have to show for it that their population will be generally sympathetic to them; that they will have little trouble recruiting, that millions of dollars will flow into their coffers, and thousands of rockets into their armouries. What will Israel have to show for it?
As to the point about victimhood and national solidarity yielding declining returns, that point applies equally well to Israel. And I think it’s pretty clear that Israel’s return is declining a lot faster than Hamas’s. "We are Hamas" in London last week, remember? The entire Arab world and much of the western world is siding, if not with Hamas, at least against Israel. Israel has the support of (not quite the whole) Jewish community, and a lame-duck president who’ll be gone in two days. You can play the "victimhood" card more convincingly if your death count is an order of magnitude (maybe two now) higher than the other guy’s. It doesn’t matter if that’s fair, or justified, or whatever – it’s true.Â
And no one can expect Israelis to care less about what happens to their
own civilians than they can about what happens to the residents of
Gaza. And as a reminder once again: I am making a (primarily
political)Â argument, not a point of advocacy, and not a
comprehensive ethical analysis. – Again, it’s that Israeli citizens will be more endangered as a result of this than they would have been otherwise. It’s that this does not actually improve life for Israelis. The point isn’t Israel should fake caring for Palestinians to win world support; it’s that Hamas gains support when it doesn’t. If Israel cares about its citizens, then it has to care about how the rest of the world will react to its actions against Gazans.  Â
A de facto ceasefire with Syria already exists and the purpose of a
treaty with Syria would be to attain more than just an end to
missile-fire… from Gaza and elsewhere. – That’s my point: if ending rocket fire from Gaza requires a serious treaty with Syria, why not just pursue the treaty? Bombing sets back the treaty, which even you acknowledge is necessary for the issue to actually be resolved.Â
I see the flow of smuggled goods from Egypt to Gaza as a major failure
of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. When Israel has destroyed
smuggling tunnels, it has been sometimes found that the Egyptian side
of the tunnel has been to a police station. In other words, Egyptian
police helping the smugglers, without the Egyptian government cracking
down. That doesn’t sound like a good-faith peace treaty to me. – This is exactly what I’m trying to say. The less the rest of the Arab world hates Israel, the easier it will be to actually get them to help us out.
As for Jer accusing Israel of 40 years of ethnic cleansing, that’s just sick. – I don’t know how you think all those Palestinians ended up in refugee camps, or pushed out of their land by illegal settlements other than by "cleansing" the land of a certain group ("ethinicity", if you will) of people. But whatever, fine. It’s a fine example of the point I’m trying to make, that Israel needs criticism because right now, it’s "just sick" to point out that Israeli settlers are stealing Palestinian land.Â
for the informative, very useful post, Zachary!
my books, my blog, my TV appearances,
Yep, that’s my youngest brother, breakin’ down the science! Way to go BIT!
 Â
Thanks for bringing some facts to the debate Binyamin.
"you support a war that is going to make it extremely difficult for any Syrian politician to ever admit to even thinking about making nice with Israel."
Do you really have any evidence for making such a statement? And who cares what a Syrian "politician" admits to? There’s a really important politician (the one in charge who isn’t answerable to such things as "elections") whose interests overrule theirs.
"So now, the war is not to remove Hamas, or limit their capabilities, or even to defend Israeli citizens in any direct way. The goal is to humiliate Hamas in the hopes that this will push them that much closer to being moderate. And this justifies the deaths of hundreds of civilians? The hope that Hamas will be embarassed?"
I don’t have a problem with limiting their capabilities, even if just for six months. But the mistake I wonder if you’re making with terms like "moderate" is one that confuses a politically-derived stance from one arrived at by practical, physical realities. Look, I realize you find the Arab outcry politically problematic, but once the hostilities end what will Hamas have to show for it? There is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to using victimhood and national solidarity bred of enemy attack as the means for rallying around a political party (see Republicans in America, ca. 2006 for details). And I’m not certain Hamas were all that well-loved in Gaza to begin with. Let’s accept that it’s just as much their calculation that they will make political hay out of this. And in the immediate and short-term future, they will. However, if they are not able to use this event as a way to advance what they can deliver for Gaza in the long-run, then that will further limit their ability to be so damned immoderate while retaining their political relevance.
I wasn’t going to respond initially to your insertion of the fact that civilian deaths will occur in war and are occurring in this one. But I actually do have a rejoinder. The fact is that I care about the deaths of civilians in Gaza and especially children, as I’m sure you do. But no one can expect Israelis and their leaders to care more about those civilians than they can expect Gaza’s own leaders to care about them. And no one can expect Israelis to care less about what happens to their own civilians than they can about what happens to the residents of Gaza. And as a reminder once again: I am making a (primarily political) argument, not a point of advocacy, and not a comprehensive ethical analysis. Â
"So if a peace treaty with Syria is the key to no more missile-fire, why not try for a cease-fire Syria?!"
I’m not sure that I understand what you’re saying here. A de facto ceasefire with Syria already exists and the purpose of a treaty with Syria would be to attain more than just an end to missile-fire… from Gaza and elsewhere.
1. Out of Jordan they did -Yes, physically, but they proceeded to carry out terror attacks against Jordan. Hamas’s leadership is already not in Gaza. If Khaled Meshal moves to Beirut at the end of this, does that mean Israel faces less rocket fire? No, it just faces it from another direction. This may qualify as a resounding victory to you, but I am less impressed.
2. Israel has one crucial responsibility: to safeguard her citizens.- My point is, this is not safeguarding anyone! I’m saying Israeli citizens are not going to be safer because of this. Tsunami-prone nations have a responsibility to safeguard their citizens too, but that doesn’t mean that we all stand by and cheer if they declare war on the sea. The safeguarding has to be effective.
 I don’t remember any trials for war crimes in the US after we
demolished two countries in WWII to secure the safety of our citizens
and to ensure freedom in Europe and Asia. – Well, gee willikers, I can’t imagine why not! Look, winners getting to write the history books is not a position you want to justify. The Soviets also never saw a war-crimes tribunal; that doesn’t meant they were angels.Â
The US killed scores, if not hundred or even thousands of civilians in Kosovo, but it got out Milosevic. – Again, the two situations are different. The Serbs were attacking a separate civilian population militarily; the analogy works only if the Yugoslav army had never set foot in Kosovo, but rather lobbed mortars there. Stopping a genocide carried out on another people is different than stopping rocket fire from within a densely populated area.Â
Hence Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt, a lot of low level
"understandings" with peaceful Gulf emirates, and the tacit support of
Saudi Arabia – I already explained why I think the case of Hamas is different from the cases with the Arab nations proper, if you think there’s a flaw in that argument, respond, don’t just assert your view again. Also, stuff like this jeopardizes our relations with those other countries. There have already been reports of shots fired at IDF soldiers along the Jordanian border. Turkey is also a great ally usually; this very site has articles about the increase in anti-Israel and anti-semitic sentiment there. The Yom Kippur war may have won us the friendship of Egypt; the operation in Gaza is the kind of thing that will make us lose it.Â
3. Some of your points I think have already been dealt with, so I’m just going to answer what I think is new:
- But if a peace treaty with Syria were to be sealed and dry up Khaled
Meshaal’s auspices, is it really arguable that Hamas would be in the
position it is in today – So if a peace treaty with Syria is the key to no more missile-fire, why not try for a cease-fire Syria?! You are claiming that this military action is worthless without Syria on board. And yet, rather than wanting to bring Syria onboard, you support a war that is going to make it extremely difficult for any Syrian politician to ever admit to even thinking about making nice with Israel.Â
- Arab street are a bit more disconnected from the priorities of their leaders than they would be under an authentic democracy – There’s still money, arms, and support that can be lent. Egyptian soldiers who sympathize with Hamas don’t vote their hearts; they just turn a blind eye when some smuggler tries to move RPGs through the Rafah crossing. And even if Arab countries aren’t democracies, no smart leader can completely ignore this.
Hamas should be given incentives, but let’s not let them believe they can overplay their hand. -So now, the war is not to remove Hamas, or limit their capabilities, or even to defend Israeli citizens in any direct way. The goal is to humiliate Hamas in the hopes that this will push them that much closer to being moderate. And this justifies the deaths of hundreds of civilians? The hope that Hamas will be embarassed?
Israel has one crucial responsibility: to safeguard her citizens. That’s the point of any democratic state. I don’t remember any trials for war crimes in the US after we demolished two countries in WWII to secure the safety of our citizens and to ensure freedom in Europe and Asia.
War is hell, but sadly, sometimes necessary. The US killed scores, if not hundred or even thousands of civilians in Kosovo, but it got out Milosevic. This is the Powell Doctrine, and despite Jer’s protests, it worked after Israel displayed military superiority in the region, and acquired nuclear weapons. Hence Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt, a lot of low level "understandings" with peaceful Gulf emirates, and the tacit support of Saudi Arabia. The new enemy are non-state actors supported by Iran. If we stay strong, they will be defeated as well. I hope and pray that our new president understands this rather simple history. I’m sure he does.
"…did the PLO go away after Black September? "
Out of Jordan they did despite the Palestian majority and Arafat and his followers fled  to Lebanaon which was a relatively stable and properous nation in the 1960′s and the PLO literally destroyed the country in the 1970′s leading to a war with Israel in 1982 and it still has not recovered. This was the man who the West thought they could do business with. Arafat’s impact still survives in Fatah and will poison generations to come.
Palestians’ ability, of course.
I’m pretty sure I managed to restrict the self-righteousness to the "why I criticize Israel" section. I explained, I think relatively clearly, why I don’t believe that Israel is actually stopping rocket fire. How Israel is only damaging its credibility and standing in the world, without achieving any aims. If missile fire is the issue, renewing the ceasefire would have made more sense; under the ceasefire missiles were fired at an average rate of (I believe) 3 a month. It doesn’t matter how far Hamas’s missiles reach if they aren’t being fired. Do you really think that Hamas is not going to get those missiles now anyway? You think millions of dollars aren’t being spent right now to buy those weapons and smuggle them to Gaza? You think people in the Arab world are going to be more or less eager to take a risk for the team and try and smuggle money and weapons to Hamas? I want to be clear here: this is not removing the threat! This is the same crap that Israel has tried for years, and the threat is still here, and if you are to be believed, it’s even worse now. Why is this time going to be different? You don’t like self-righteousness, so I’ll try my dangdest not to appeal to morality. But pragmatism and morality are related: a strategy cannot be moral if it is not effective. Killing civilians may or may not be justified in service of some goal, but if it has no hope of advancing the goal then its wrongness is self-evident. Let’s be clear: the Palestinians ability and desire to attack Israel will not change at all, except that desire might go up. On Tuesday a new President takes office, a few weeks after that are the Israeli elections. If you think this thing isn’t going to wrapped up and presented to the public as a stunning victory against terror by then, well, I don’t know what to say. This war will not make Israel suddenly safe, and no one believes it will. I can’t imagine you seriously believe that in one month time, or whenever this thing concludes, Hamas will retreat into its corner, Fatah will take over again, and the only precipitation kids in Sderot will have to worry about will be unseasonal hail. You and I both know that this time next year, we’ll be having the same argument again. So, if civilian casualties are acceptable to remove Hamas, but this operation will not remove Hamas, the point does not then follow that civilian casualties are okay.Â
Black September just proves my point: did the PLO go away after Black September? Did they give up and decide, oh, goodness, we didn’t realize these guys fought back? No, instead they successfully assassinated a Jordanian Prime Minister, and tried for the ambassador to England. The point is not whether because Jordan did it, we’re allowed to do it; the point is, it didn’t work for Jordan. Why will it work for us?It’s been nearly forty years since Black September, and Fatah is still around. They still have to be dealt with. All those people killed did not result in anyone getting any closer to any sort of peace deal. All the people being killed now won’t help us any more this time.
I’m going to deal with your points out of order, and maybe not all in one comment, since I’m enjoying a bowl of cereal at the moment, but my first-reaction comments are:
The point that I think Goldberg and Gerecht are missing is that there isn’t any way for Israel to score a meaningful victory over Hamas. If Israel inflicts damage on Gaza and its population, then Hamas’s currency soars in the Arab world. Read this, or this, and see what I mean. The difference between Hamas and Egypt is that when Israel beat Egypt, the only Egyptians who personally suffered were soldiers. There were no gory pictures of dead Egyptian babies from the war, and so, less resentment against Israel’s policies. It doesn’t matter if Israel thinks it’s only waging war against Hamas, and all these civilians are getting in the way – there’s no way the Arab world will see it that way. War against Hamas, unlike war against Egypt, means dead civilians. Dead civilians mean an angry Arab world. That means more Hamas support, not less. The siege and semi-starvation of Gaza can not have helped.
This is the one point that the "but Hamas hides behind civilians!" crowd seems to constantly miss: if Hamas hides behind civilians, it’s because they have a reason to. They have no illusions that Israel will decide to hold fire because a small child is in the way, and yet they do it anyway, knowing it can’t save them. Why? Because they understand that Israel is shooting itself in the foot each time it busts in and cracks heads.Â
Like I say, I’m not responding to everything right now, but as to your last point:
the reason I criticize Israel first is that being a Jew and a North American, I both feel more responsible for Israel’s actions, and believe that I have a better chance of changing Israel’s actions. Furthermore, in the west at least, and certainly on a website like this, everyone knows about the track record of Hamas. Everyone knows exactly why Hamas is bad. But people are blind to the fact that Israel is extremely flawed too. If the majority of posters here were willing to be honest about Israel’s human rights record, I wouldn’t pick on Israel so much. But in spite of forty years of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment, people here still seem to largely think that Israel is some put-upon saint of a country, suffering tribulations not of its own making. I want Jews especially to realize what it is that they support when they support "disproportionate responses", or if they favour blockading Gaza; that they are supporting war crimes and moral atrocities. And they are. Even if Hamas does the same. Even if Hamas does worse. Targetting civilians and starving out a population are monstrous crimes. Launching a war that has no purpose, as far as I can see, other than to bolster some electoral prospects, is an outrage. And it’s an outrage that my own friends and family enthusiastically support. No one here supports Hamas, so why would I try and convince anyone that they shouldn’t? Who would I be talking to? If you point me to someone on this website who favours targetting Israeli civilians, I will go and do so. If there’s a poster who regularly prints articles slanted to present a distorted account of events that seems to favour the Palestinians, lemme at ‘em! But that doesn’t happen. The only arguments I see here for killing civilians only seem to apply to the case when the civilians are Arabs. The only revisions are done to favour Israel. And so, I speak out against them.
Appreciate the postiive comments. I know we disagree a lot on the politics so I’m glad you’re part of the dialogue. Try this on for size:
1) Why is it that our worst enemies have softened towards Israel? By any logical accounting of history, it’s because of the horrendous military defeats the Arabs suffered after wars they instigated in 1948 (radically increased the size of Israel), 1967 (doubled the size of Israel), 1973 (made Israel even bigger) and 1980 (removed PLO from the region, until it was invited back). If you’re familiar with the region, then you’ll know that might makes right. Sad, but true. (Incidentally, this is the same everywhere.)
2) Read Jefferey Goldberg’s response to his own piece in the Times the other day. http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/gerecht.php He basically reverses his position by saying that force can "moderate" Hamas.
3) The Palestinian history is one of misery and sadness. It’s depressing. Their name itself is a political term created by Arafat in the 1960s to describe a group of people who are no ethnically or religiously different from their immediate neighbors like Jordan or Syria. (Remember that all nationalities were created after WWI and don’t reflect an ethnic, cultural or linguistic history.) And that’s just the beginning. They’re the only people in the world to have to live in multi-generational refugee camps across the Middle East, run by countries which profess to have their best interests in mind. And then they dismissed their one shot at nationhood in 2000 with a violent uprising. I’m not anti-Palestinian since I’m not anti-anyone, but their history is one marked by vagueness, corruption and Arab victimhood — and many, many bad political decisions. The outcome of their second intifadah? A Palestinian civil war, demoralized Fatah and now a massacred Hamas. Not good.
4) Israel didn’t need to withdraw from Gaza to strengthen its hand in the West Bank. In fact, since 2005 Israel has been cedeing more control to the PA in the West Bank in self-rule experiments that have been largely successful, as reported by the NY Times. (The US has been training Fatah regulars, and it’s worked.) The Israeli military is so powerful that it could easily control both territories simultaneously –which it did for over thirty years.
For some reason the contemporary Liberal impulse is to criticize Israel first, and then to look for moral equivalency among a people with a medieval-era human rights track record (Islamists) and the first democracy in the region. Why is that? Â
Peace – ZBT Â
"…in the end, even our worst enemies can (and have) softened towards us.."
Only after inflicting worse damage than what’s being done to Hamas.
If your refering to Israel’s good friends Egypt and Jordan I refer you to the wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and all the bloodshed in between. In addition, having a few nuclear weapons in your pocket also does wonders for the attitudes of established nation states on your borders.
That’s why I’m so skeptical of thinking that getting rid of Hamas is such a necessary goal that it’s worth sacrificing hundreds of civilian lives; in the end, even our worst enemies can (and have) softened towards us. In another twenty years, it might seem absurd to people that Israel ever thought it was worth inflicting this sort of damage on Hamas, now that they’re friends/irrelevant/marginalized in favour of a more dangerous group, or whatever. I don’t think there will ever be a perfect peace partner (on either side), so better to work with whoever’s there than to keep bombing in the hopes making the overall situation more favourable.
Anyway, while I do think your article is pretty heavily slanted to present only Palestinian failures, and credits Israel only ever with benign motives (you really don’t think the Gaza withdrawal had anything to do with strengthening the Israeli hold on the West Bank?), it’s at least a decent chronology of the greatest hits of the last few decades.
Jer, you read the whole article! I’m impressed.
 As far as Israel supporting Hamas, who knows? It seems plausible if it waslimited in scope and duration, and took place twenty years ago.
 The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Who would have thought the Hashemite Kindgom in Jordan would be so pro-Israel, or that Israel is coordinating its attack on Gaza with Egypt? Or that there is no a quiet Jewish-Sunni alliance against the Shia Crescent? How times have changed.Â
A quick search of sources on Israel funding Hamas turns up this and, interestingly, this. Even if it’s not true, or half-true, or whatever, the idea seems to have currency even in Israel, if only as a means to beat one’s political enemies.
Make of this what you will.
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