The New Nation - Internet Edition

Dr Azzam Tamimi

Daily deadly attacks on Gaza, the resumption of incursions into West Bank towns and villages and the plan to build three hundred housing units in East Jerusalem is hardly what the Arabs who attended Annapolis conference expected to be its immediate results. The Israeli measures must have surprised even Palestinian Authority President, Mahmud Abbas, and his team mates who, at Annapolis, were all smiles. Anyone watching TV footage of the Annapolis receptions could not miss the opportunity to see members of the Palestinian team warmly hugging members of the Israeli team, while other Arab delegates watched from a distance. The smiles on the faces reflected a congratulatory mood and expressed optimism that some unprecedented breakthrough was in the pipeline.

The reality is that Annapolis has primarily been about two things; first, maintaining the sanctions against the Gaza Strip and increasing the pressure on Hamas; and second, re-launching the Road Map, which had long been dead and buried. It is no wonder that the suffering of the Palestinians under collective punishment in the Gaza Strip was not an issue worth mentioning at Annapolis.

Just over a year before leaving office, President George W Bush has had the opportunity to revive the Road Map, a project said to be aimed at the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. The project failed once before when Yassir Arafat was head of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). At the time, Mahmud Abbas was his prime minister, imposed on him by the US Administration. Today, Abbas is the President and US-hand picked Salam Fayyad is his prime minister. Yet, there is little to suggest that the Road Map stands a better chance.

The Road Map stipulates that the Palestinian Authority must first crack down on the opponents of Israel in the Palestinian. For a while before going to Annapolis, the Ramallah Authority had been waging a campaign across the West Bank against individuals and institutions suspected of links to Hamas. Since his return from Annapolis, Ramallah's Prime Minister, Fayyad, enhanced his effort in this regard. His latest initiative has been the closure of scores of charities. His victims include Zakat committees, which are associated with local mosques, that have traditionally provided the public with services such as sponsoring orphans and poor families and collecting donations from the rich and distributing money, food and clothing to those who are in need.

The Palestinian public are aware that Fayyad's Government could do little without the support and protection accorded to him and his men by the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank. Activists from Hamas and the other factions, including Fatah itself, are being targeted by both Israel and the PNA in a concerted effort to remove any potential threat to Fayyda's authority. It is ironic that these same measures were tried before in Gaza in the mid 1990s as part of the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Less than ten years later, and as soon as the Palestinians had the freedom to elect their representatives, they voted for Hamas.

Upon learning of the success of Hamas in the January 2006 elections, Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, formed two committees and commissioned them to deliberate the matter and submit their recommendations to him. He wanted them to advise him how best to deal with this 'nightmarish' development. One of the committees, headed by Major General (retd) Giora Eiland, former Head of the Israeli National Security Council and National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister, concluded that a new reality had emerged and that it would be in the best interests of Israel to reach an understanding of some sort with Hamas whom the election proved was speaking for the majority of the Palestinians in the territories. Interestingly, General Eiland, together with an increasing number of Israeli politicians including Amir Peretz, has been urging Israel to negotiate with Hamas.

The other committee, which included in its membership current Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, and former Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Dan Haluz, concluded that Hamas could never be worked with and that the only option Olmert had was to empower Abbas so as to bring Hamas down.

Olmert opted for the second set of recommendations and came up with his three conditions that soon afterwards became the Quartet* conditions shutting the door on Hamas and rallying the international community with the support of his US backers to boycott the movement and punish the Palestinians for having voted for it. It was assumed that Hamas could not resist the sanctions for long because the people would rise against it and that eventually it would either accept the conditions or hand power back to Fatah. The US-Israeli campaign against Hamas backfired.

Few lessons seem to have been learned by those who devised the policy of sanctions. The current US-Israeli approach to dealing with the Palestinians, who since June have been living under two separate and feuding authorities, is based on the assumption that the sanctions are working and that Hamas is losing support. Polls conducted by local Palestinian groups, which are invariably funded by US agencies, point to the decline of Hamas's popularity among the Palestinians.

Policy makers in Washington are clearly guided, or misguided, by wishful thinking and misinformation. There is no evidence that Hamas's popularity has dwindled. To the contrary, it is evident that the current crisis is blamed more on Abbas than on Hamas. Additionally, while the economy is in bad shape in Gaza, the average Palestinian there feels safer than ever before. While Hamas cannot be blamed for shortages of food or fuel it is credited for the prevalence of security, something which most Gazans missed when Abbas's men were in charge up to the middle of June 2007. In contrast, while the economic situation is not as bad in the West Bank most of its inhabitants complain of the lack of personal and collective safety. Scores of Palestinians are arrested every day by Israel or the PNA while thugs acting with impunity continue to have a free hand in harassing people and abusing them. To add insult to injury, Fayyad's security agencies compete to close down charities and other civil society institutions provoking a sense of anger and frustration reminiscent of that experienced in the mid 1990s.

While the Fatah movement is increasingly in disarray, the Ramallah Government is seen by many Fatah loyalists as a bunch of outsiders. An increasing number of Fatah leaders have recently been more vocal in calling for its replacement. A statement released in Ramallah by Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has gone as far as describing Fayyad's administration as a puppet government of Israel and the US.

A recent debacle by the PNA representative at the UN, who is not a Fatah member, urging the General Assembly to adopt a resolution declaring Hamas "an outlawed militia" sent many Fatah supporters wondering who the man was speaking for. There can be nothing more tarnishing to Fatah's image than the fact that the project of 'reform the movement' is said to undertake under the supervision of Dennis Ross who is commissioned and funded by the US Congress and who has been visiting the West Bank frequently for this purpose.

One wonders whether the Americans and the Israelis are at all aware that post-Annapolis Abbas is, as a result, a much weaker man. Palestinians and Arabs alike feel the man wittingly or otherwise deceived them by pinning high hopes on Annapolis. Evidently, the Egyptians and the Saudis dealt him a painful blow when they agreed with the Hamas leadership to allow Gaza's pilgrims to travel to Makkah via the Rafah crossing, which was closed in the aftermath of Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June. His Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, had already made arrangements to transport the pilgrims via Israel to the West Bank and then via Jordan to Saudi Arabia in a bid to improve that he was in charge and that Hamas was irrelevant. His plot did not work.

Deluded by wishful thinking, the Israelis and the Americans have been wagering on the losing horse despite its futility. There is only one way out of the current predicament and that is to abandon the policy of turning the PNA into another Lahad entity and seek an understanding with Hamas. The movement should be talked to without preconditions. A number of issues need to be immediately addressed.

There is first the problem of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Exchanging Shalit for Palestinian prisoners, and there are nearly 12,000 of them in Israel's captivity, should set the scene for further undertakings. Secondly, the sanctions and the regime of collective punishments should come to an end.

This may be negotiated as part of a tahdi'ah, a period of calming, during which the firing of rockets from Gaza is stopped and so is the hunting of Palestinian activists in the West Bank. A series of measures should enable the two sides, in due course, to negotiate a long-term cease-fire that will end up with a total disengagement along the pre-June 1967 war armistice lines.

Hamas is here to stay and those interested in resolving the conflict have no option but to knock on its door.

(Dr Azzam Tamimi, Director, Institute of Islamic Political Thought, London)