Last Friday, thirty-five thousand Gazans staged a march to the border fence with Israel under the banner of “Return.” The demonstrations have thinned but not abated this week; large tents have been set up within the sight of Israeli snipers, as if base camps for future acts of daring. Some demonstrators encroached on what the Army has designated a prohibited area, three hundred metres in front of the fence. Others slung rocks, or burned tires. Since the demonstrations began, including clashes over the past seven days, nineteen Palestinians have been shot and killed, and a thousand have been wounded, according to reports from Gaza hospitals. Another march is called for Friday. Hamas, which has organized it, hopes to bring out as many as fifty thousand people, and eventually, week by week, turn the demonstrations into a cause the civilized world, such as it is, cannot ignore.
The soldiers’ use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators prompted the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, to call for “an independent and transparent investigation.” A Times editorial called the gunfire “excessive.” The Israeli civil-rights groups B’Tzelem (“In the Image,” as in “image of God”) and Shovrim Shtika (“Breaking the Silence”) have called on soldiers to refrain from shooting. But for most Israelis the soldiers’ shoot-to-kill response seems no more than business as usual, comparable to the actions of the military when Palestinian-refugee demonstrators tried to storm the border in the Golan Heights, in 2011, leaving twenty dead and hundreds wounded. The demonstrators are talking about “return,” after all, and infiltrators in the past have murdered civilians. Hamas organized dozens of suicide bombings in restaurants and buses in its thirty-year history, and, since it took control of Gaza, in 2007, has launched hundreds of missiles into civilian areas.
“They all talk about destroying and hating Israel, and about returning refugees to Safed, to Haifa, to Jaffa,” the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said, after the killing of demonstrators. Lieberman is notoriously hard-line, but the leaders of the government’s centrist opposition, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, and Labor’s Avi Gabbay, back him on this. Gaza, they know, unites the Israeli public and makes it sore. When Kobi Meidan, a veteran broadcaster on Israeli Army Radio, spoke of being “ashamed to be Israeli” after the shootings, he quickly retreated in the face of the backlash, apologizing for offending the soldiers and speaking “before he had all the information.” Of major parties, only the Arab Joint List has condemned the Army for its fire.
There is no question that many Gazans are suffering, and that the demonstrations are an expression of desperation; for years, the press has reported on electricity being restricted to a few hours a day, and of the imminent collapse of systems supplying water and sewerage. About half of Palestinian youth are unemployed, and large numbers of children suffer from depression. But, when Lieberman talks of “they” and their hatred, he is calling attention to Hamas’s decade-long rule of Gaza. Most Israelis suppose, not without cause, that Hamas is committed to a severe Islamist theocracy, and armed struggle against Israel, or against any Palestinian willing to reconcile with it. Of Gaza’s 1.8 million tightly packed residents, two-thirds are refugees, or the descendants of refugees, from what is now Israel. Israelis also assume that most Gazans heedlessly back Hamas and its program.
Hamas’s military wing has, in the past, hidden missile sites in populated areas, knowing that these could be bombed. If it is prepared to use such “human shields” to deter attack, could it not use human sacrifices to gain a public-relations victory? “Anyone who approaches the fence endangers his life, and I would recommend that Gaza residents put their efforts not into protesting against Israel but into regime change within the Strip,” Lieberman said. So Gaza has become something of a black box for the Israeli public, the inputs known—siege and periodic repression—the outputs known, depravation and periodic defiance. Hamas’s motives are presumably indistinguishable from its capabilities: if it gains the power to injure Israel it will do so, as if by reflex. Its popularity is presupposed. The harsh and consistent Israeli inputs are meant to bring Gazans to their senses. What’s unknown, because it is largely unexamined, except by military intelligence, is Hamas’s strategy after more than a decade of ruling the Strip—is it still wedded to ceaseless violence or does it have a growing incentive to pursue a nonviolent mass mobilization?
Hamas has a new leader, Yahya Sinwar, elected in February, 2017, who, unlike past Hamas leaders, knows Hebrew, having spent twenty-three years in Israeli prisons. He is notoriously tough, having personally hunted and executed “collaborators,” yet, according to Avi Issacharoff, a journalist specializing in Palestinian affairs, he is “not an adventurer”—he does not want another war. At the same time, he cannot cope with the status quo as his predecessors have. The situation in Gaza is, indeed, dreadful. Then-I.D.F. Military Intelligence chief, Herzl Halevi, told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in February, 2016: “The humanitarian condition in Gaza is progressively deteriorating, and if it blows up, it’ll be in Israel’s direction.” Halevi agreed with a U.N. report that the Strip will be uninhabitable by 2020. The situation is so extreme, and so ominous for Israel, that Lieberman himself proposed a U.N. mandate back in 2014. Transportation Minister Israel Katz—a potential rival to lead the Likud if Benjamin Netanyahu is forced out by corruption investigations—has been advancing the idea of Israel unilaterally building an artificial island off the coast of Gaza that could serve as a port under Israeli inspection.
Meanwhile, Sinwar is increasingly boxed in by Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who controls access to this border, and has shut down most of Hamas’s trade—and, hence, its revenue—through the tunnels to Egypt. Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s mentors, and wants—the journalist Danny Rubinstein told me—to stabilize Gaza, preferably, with the Palestinian Authority’s coöperation, so that Egypt can fight isis in the Sinai: “Sisi has millions of people waking up every morning unsure if they will eat that day,” Rubinstein says. “He has lost patience with Palestinians complaining about settlers stealing an olive orchard here and there. He wants to be sure that Hamas is not giving isis aid and comfort.” Sisi would even be willing to coöperate with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s rival, Mohammed Dahlan, who has been lavishly funded by sources in the Emirates, if Dahlan could bring Hamas into a coöperative framework that would stabilize Gaza and allow for its rehabilitation. “Sisi wants to recruit Hamas into his fight, not the other way around,” Rubinstein says.
Abbas, for his part, has been trying to drive Sinwar into a corner. Sinwar knows that Hamas is not nearly as popular as the Israeli public assumes. The latest pollby Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which has itself been at odds with Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, puts Hamas’s popularity in Gaza at perhaps thirty per cent, roughly the same as Fatah’s. Both parties are blamed for the failure of reconciliation talks. Hamas has slightly moderated its views, revising its charter last May to entertain, as part of a “national consensus,” an independent state in the 1967 borders. But Abbas has insisted that, if the P.A. is to manage and to fund civil services and police in Gaza, pay for the fuel that generates electricity—and give Israel sufficient grounds to relieve the siege—Hamas’s military wing, reportedly as many as thirty thousand armed cadres, must disarm. The demonstrations are a way to escape Abbas’s cornering. For the first time, Hamas may plausibly see nonviolent mass struggle as its only option to break the Israeli blockade and to force a reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority on its terms.
“What Israelis do not understand is that Hamas was determined to keep the demonstrations totally nonviolent. They want the largest possible participation,” Shikaki told me in an interview, in Ramallah. “They are busing people in. But you don’t see Hamas’s flags or anybody else’s flags. The march is an indication, not just of Hamas influence but of huge public discontent Hamas itself must contend with.” He said a goal of the demonstrations could be to remind the world of the stresses of life in Gaza under the Israeli blockade, forgotten especially since the Trump Administration took office, and use them to potentially “gain the right to send agricultural produce to the West Bank, or make it possible for Gazans to travel again, to Jordan—to breathe again.”
Hamas, manifestly, cannot control all the young people at the border; Islamic Jihad has a different command structure, and, just two weeks ago, was foiled trying to attack an Israeli naval vessel. But Shikaki argues that Hamas, for its strategy to work, must try to eliminate casualties altogether. Ironically, Hamas wants Israeli military professionals, who warn of explosion, to gain the upper hand in their dispute with the Netanyahu government. “If things escalate, the P.A. will be pointing a finger: O.K., you organized this, now how are you going to respond? You go to war, services totally collapse. You fail to respond, you look weak and reckless. The idea is to give people a chance to vent without violence—that is the balance Hamas has to maintain.” Hamas will never disarm, Shikaki added, and it is unrealistic for the Palestinian Authority or Israel to expect its members to do so. “They know that their arms, their military ‘steadfastness,’ their armaments infrastructure, are what really differentiates them from Fatah in the minds of their supporters. Fatah is for internationalization and diplomacy; Hamas for struggle. But it wants to show that it can nevertheless conduct a nonviolent struggle—force Abbas to agree to reconciliation on their terms, without disarming.”
Israelis remain deeply skeptical and are bracing for acts of terror. In 2006, Ehud Olmert offered Hamas the chance to become a normalized political party—if it renounced violence, accepted international agreements, and, so, in effect, recognized Israel, none of which it was prepared to do. But Hamas is actually out of options, much like Abbas is. Moreover, Shikaki says, Hamas has “been in government.” It has made clear it is willing to “respect,” but not accept, the conditions under which the P.A., and the Palestine Liberation Organization, have entered into negotiations. “What does Israel want?,” Shikaki says, “A humanitarian disaster? New escalation? A war every three years?” Responding to the Gaza demonstrations with such violence, Shikaki implies, is certainly not in Israel’s interest. “This is a process, with Hamas getting drawn into the responsibilities of governing, and signalling to the Amy and others in the Israeli government who are willing to think more creatively. The march is intended to accelerate the process.”
Bernard Avishai teaches political economy at Dartmouth and is the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” “The Hebrew Republic,” and “Promiscuous,” among other books. He was selected as a Guggenheim fellow in 1987.Read more »
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