Hamas has locked itself into the Gaza Strip with one-and-a-half million Palestinians and thrown away the key. Its seizure of control is political and economic lunacy because, for all its triumphant shouts, a sterile impasse has been created from which there is no painless retreat.
Where does the Hamas leadership imagine Gaza is going to go from here? With the exception of radicals in Tehran, there is no regional support for this action. Physically and politically isolated, the future must look grim for the ordinary inhabitants. They may have originally voted for a Hamas government, something that the movement’s leadership rightly keeps reminding everybody. All the same, Gaza’s electorate never imagined they were voting for this — for imprisonment, for isolation, for yet greater misery and hardship in eking out their day-to-day lives.
Within the government of national unity and within the framework of the Makkah agreement, Hamas had the chance to finesse its rejection of the Israeli state and persuade the international community that it deserved its role within the peace process. It had the opportunity to demonstrate that it was not the nihilistic force for evil its enemies claimed. Instead, in the last 24 hours, Washington has had the opportunity to wag its finger and tell the world that Hamas is indeed the untrustworthy political beast it claimed all along. Worse, the Europeans, who had been moving, albeit far too slowly, to embracing Hamas within the national unity government, have been left wrong-footed.
With Hamas controlling more than a half of the Palestinian population, there can be no resumption of the peace process. Aid may flow in greater quantities to the West Bank and the new government appointed yesterday by President Mahmoud Abbas, but this will only serve to deepen the rift between the rival Palestinian territories. Indeed, Washington’s Zionist lobby will no doubt positively encourage such an exercise. Perhaps Hamas’ next move will be to reopen its campaign of rocket attacks into Israel. The strategy may be to provoke the Israelis into an all-out ground invasion, which it is imagined could be repulsed in the same way that Hezbollah beat the Israelis last year in Lebanon. But Gaza is not southern Lebanon. The civilian casualties from such an attack would be horrific and the military odds stacked heavily against the defenders. So too would be the political odds. Though West Bank Palestinians would recoil at the slaughter and the Arab and wider world protest vigorously, the Israelis would be able to present a stronger case than ever they did for assailing the Lebanon.
The seeds of this grave crisis were created when the UN, US, Russia and the Europeans refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government. They were sown by the inability of Fatah and Hamas leaders to work together for the common cause and now they have been watered by the blood of Palestinians, shed by other Palestinians. The eventual harvest of these wicked follies currently promises to be tragic in the extreme.
