What is Hamas trying to achieve by firing rockets into Israel? I’m not asking about its right to do so, or what the alternatives are, or the pros and cons of the whole 70-year-old dispute. I’m asking a narrower strategic question. What are the people who run Gaza trying to achieve by lobbing ordnance across the border?
When I posed the question on Twitter, my normally vocal anti-Israel readers went quiet. My pro-Israel readers, naturally, were full of explanations: Hamas was deliberately provoking a response so as to gain international sympathy, they said; it was consciously hoping for civilian deaths; it didn’t mind Arab casualties provided there were also Jewish casualties. Some of my pro-Palestine readers criticised these responses but, when I pressed them, still didn’t answer the original question. What is Hamas hoping to achieve?
It’s true that the Internet generally, and Twitter particularly, are not places to go for subtle, nuanced argument. If you take any kind of compromise position on Israel/Palestine, you can expect to be called an apologist for murder by supporters of both sides.
In fact, it’s possible to believe that Gazans are suffering unnecessarily from the siege while still thinking that Hamas’s actions are leading them to catastrophe. It’s possible to believe that Israel has the right - the duty, indeed - to defend its citizens, while doubting whether a campaign in which 75 per cent of the 620 casualties are civilians is truly, as the IDF insists, based on the maximum possible precision targeting. It’s possible, too, to believe these things while rejecting the notion that the number of casualties determines which side is right. During the Second World War, many more German civilians were killed by the RAF than were British civilians by the Luftwaffe. Every civilian death, then as now, was a horror; but no one tried to tally them into a score-sheet of moral advantage.
Let me go back to my original question. The most rational explanation I can find for Hamas’s renewal of hostilities is that it’s trying to shore up its support in Gaza. The Syrian civil war and the Egyptian coup have deprived the paramilitaries of, respectively, their chief sponsor and their most immediate sympathiser. Isolated and bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of their 40,000 government employees, Hamas leaders seem to have decided to stake everything on a military campaign. Possibly, like Galtieri’s junta in 1982, they feel they have little to lose. At best, a new ceasefire might result in concessions, such as prisoner releases or - the big prize - a reopening of Gaza’s borders. At worst, the conflict should rally people to their regime.
Tragically, though, the very fact of renewed violence makes it hard for Israeli leaders even to discuss an easing of border controls. Look at Gaza from their point of view. Arab states had been demanding for decades that Israel withdraw from the territory. In 2005, Israel did so, physically dragging some reluctant settlers from their homes. The only things left behind were greenhouses, which a consortium of American Jews bought and handed to the Gazan authorities. The greenhouses were almost immediately smashed and, ever since, Gaza has sporadically sent suicide bombers and rockets into Israel. What elected politician, in such circumstances, can argue for a dismantling of the Israel-Gaza frontier?
And yet an open border is, in the long run, the best hope for both sides. As long as Gaza remains what it is today - a sealed refugee camp, dependent on overseas aid, with no secure property rights and almost no commercial activity - it is an ideal terrorist habitat. Elsewhere in the Arab world, Palestinians are disproportionately represented in the professional and managerial classes. But the circumstances of the West Bank and, even more, of Gaza, might have been specifically designed to close that option off.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Palestinians were able to buy and sell freely across borders. Imagine that a substantial bourgeoisie were to take form in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian businessmen would, we may be pretty certain, take a dim view of young men firing rockets from their property and triggering retaliation. They would vote for politicians offering stability and order. They would want to remain on good terms with their customers - including their customers in Israel, which would be by far their largest market. The Gaza strip might, in time, become a popular beach destination: friends who know about these things tell me that you won’t find better surfing conditions anywhere in the Mediterranean.
Obviously we’re a very long way from any such scenario. Perhaps it will never be attained. But it’s worth a try, isn’t it? And trying will mean both sides having to swallow some hard things. Palestinians would have to accept that there would be no return to the pre-1967 borders: the new frontiers would be essentially ethnographic - possibly including referendums in Arab Israeli villages.
For Israel, it would mean having to work with many of today’s Hamas paramilitaries as Palestinian soldiers and policemen. Something similar happened in Ireland after 1921, when former IRA men formed the security services of the new state, and crushed the rejectionists among their former comrades with a thoroughness that stunned British observers.
Sadly, both sides are currently drifting in the opposite direction. Hamas seems to prefer war to negotiations, while many Israelis are losing interest in the whole notion of a two-state solution, preparing instead for a permanent occupation of the Palestinian territories and trusting to immigration and demographics to give the combined territory, from the sea to the Jordan, a Jewish majority.
The case for two secure states, living alongside each other, buying and selling from each other, growing over time - as Ireland and the UK did - into partners and allies, has almost been lost by default. Advance it and both sides will shout you down. You doubt me? Watch the comment thread that follows.
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