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Israel/ Palestine
Hamas: A 2023 Counterfactual

Hamas: A 2023 Counterfactual

Jeffrey Rudolph 10/21/2023

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Detailed Political Quizzes

Because facts matter

( Detailed Political Quizzes) – Hamas’s horrific October 7 terrorism should not be justified by any serious person. I have nothing to add to the intelligent writings of Professor Juan Cole on this matter. (For an illustrative example, please refer to Prof. Cole’s article dated October 16, 2023, available at:
https://www.juancole.com/2023/10/dangerous-islamic-massacres.html)

However, a worthwhile counterfactual to ponder is: What would have been Israel’s likely response had Hamas exclusively targeted Israeli soldiers during its Oct. 7 attack?

While it’s impossible to know the answer to a counterfactual question, an examination of historical instances where Hamas’s actions were positive or within conventional norms, can offer insights. Accordingly, consider the following seven events.

1. In its 2006 election manifesto, “Hamas made no reference to Israel’s destruction. It spoke instead about ‘the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem.’”

“[A]fter its election victory, Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah ‘for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.’ Israel could have embraced this [as an opening for talks].”

“Instead, the United States and Israel demanded that Hamas formally foreswear violence, embrace two states and accept past peace agreements — a standard that Netanyahu’s own government [has never met]. Hamas, which spent the Oslo years calling the PLO dupes for recognizing Israel without getting a Palestinian state in return, refused. So Washington and Jerusalem pressured [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament.”

Then, in 2007, the US and Israel, in a failed effort to destroy Hamas, “backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.” (“The Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto…wrote in a confidential 2007 ‘End of Mission Report’ that the violence between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the United States not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation.”)

Israel, with the support of the US and Egypt, then “imposed a blockade designed not only to prevent Hamas from importing weapons, but to punish Gazans for electing it.” The result was devastation for Gaza’s economy and society.

2. After the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian militants in a 2006 cross-border raid, a detailed document was “sent by messenger to then [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” The document included the following: “Hamas offers two alternatives: (i) A separate track, dealing only with the release of Gilad Shalit in return for 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners. (ii) A release of prisoners will take place in the broader context of a strategic approach ‏(as follows‏), and the number of prisoners released will not be in the hundreds.”

The detailed document, “whose existence and transmission to the prime minister were denied completely by Olmert’s office at the time, constituted an offer by Hamas to conduct a multilevel dialogue with Israel, beginning with discussion about a cease-fire and the building of long-term trust, and ending with a coexistence agreement to last 25 years, and the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.”

3. In 2006, Khaled Meshal, then Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, told former US president Jimmy Carter that “Hamas agreed to accept any peace agreement negotiated between the leaders of the PLO and Israel, provided it is subsequently approved by Palestinians in a referendum or by a democratically elected government.”

In 2007, Meshal made the following statements: “[T]here will remain a state called Israel—this is a matter of fact.…The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel. The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent.” “As a Palestinian…I speak…for a state on 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of Palestinian land.” (Again in 2014, Meshal made similar statements.)

Article continues after bonus IC video
NBC News: “Israeli airstrikes push Gaza’s second largest hospital to the brink”

Meshal’s statements, while dismissed by Israel’s leaders, reveal a common evolution of militant groups. “It’s easy to proclaim abstract-moral solutions when you lack the obligations of power, but each time a Palestinian leadership has reached a position of official responsibility (first the PLO in 1974 when Arafat spoke at the United Nations, then Hamas in 2006, when it won the parliamentary elections), it had to revise its political program from a ‘one-state’ to a ‘two-state’ settlement, because otherwise it could not function on the international stage.”

4. In June 2008, Egypt “­brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas…­[that] was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters.”

(In a “document entitled ‘The Hamas terror war against Israel,’ the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides striking visual evidence of Hamas’s good faith during the lull. It reproduces two graphs…[that] show that the total number of rocket and mortar attacks shrank from 245 in June to 26 total for July through October…”)

According to former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, “From the opening salvo [of the resulting 2008-09 Gaza war], [Israel’s] government articulated no strategic goal, held out no hopes for peace talks once the hostilities were over, offered nothing to the Gazan people, and strove neither for diplomatic success nor for reconquering the territory and ousting Hamas.”

5. According to an October 2012 New York Times article, “Hamas…is working to suppress the more radical Islamic militant groups that have emerged [in Gaza].” According to a March 2014 Financial Times article, Hamas militiamen continue to “find and stop renegade militants inside Gaza from firing rockets into southern Israel in violation of the ceasefire declared after the end in November 2012 of Operation Pillar of Defense, in which about 150 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed….Israeli officials share the assessment that Hamas is working actively to contain militants from firing into their country. ‘Today we can describe Hamas as a much more…responsible organisation than it used to be a decade or two decades ago — this all in light of their statehood experience,’ says a senior Israel Defence Forces officer…” (Nevertheless, Israel’s strict air, land and sea blockade of Gaza remained virtually unchanged.)

6. During the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Netanyahu, “in a national broadcast, stated that the sole purpose of Hamas’s tunnels was ‘to annihilate our civilians and to kill our children’. However, Israel had already seen six instances in which Hamas was able to use the tunnels against Israel. Once when Gilad Shalit was captured [in 2006], and the rest during the [2014 conflict]. In all instances, Hamas’s target were [Israeli] soldiers, not [Israeli] communities.”

Furthermore, a UN report acknowledged that the targeted IDF positions were “‘in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line [i.e., the 1949 Armistice line], which are legitimate military targets.’…[As] Israel has deprived the people of Gaza of their right to self-determination via an externally imposed occupation[,] Hamas has the right to target via tunnels Israeli combatants enforcing this occupation from without…”

“In May 2016, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz obtained a leaked copy of a state comptroller’s report on the 2014 war. According to Haaretz’s summary, the audit stated ‘that the Israeli leadership didn’t seriously consider easing the economic restrictions on Gaza, which might have delayed the eruption of the 50-day war in the summer of 2014.’”

7. “In 1988, Hamas published a despicable and blatantly anti-Semitic Charter that cited the Protocols of the Elders of the Zion. In 2017, it published a new Charter that claimed ‘its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion…’ Asking which [charter] represents Hamas’s ‘real’ views misses the point. Like other movements, Hamas evolves in response to events.”

“It’s not Hamas’s Islamism that keeps it from recognizing Israel. It’s simply good politics. In the eyes of most Palestinians, Fatah’s strategy of recognizing Israel has failed. It has led not to Palestinian statehood but to deepened occupation. That creates a market for a more hardline alternative. Eliminate Islamism from Palestinian politics and some leftist or nationalist faction would fill that same hardline niche and become America’s new bogeyman. Nor would eliminating Hamas eliminate Palestinian violence. After all, Palestinian leftist and nationalist groups fought Israel violently for decades before Hamas was born.”

“Fundamentally, Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. It dominates and brutalizes another people. Until that domination and brutalization ends, every cease-fire will be merely an interval until the next war, regardless of which parties lead the Palestinian struggle.”

Jeffrey Rudolph, a retired college professor, has prepared widely distributed pieces on various topics. The references for this piece are provided at the responses to questions 2., 3., 7., and 8. of the Hamas Quiz:
https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/

Comments can be sent to Israel-Palestine-Quiz@live.com

Via Detailed Political Quizzes

Filed Under: Israel/ Palestine

About the Author

Jeffrey Rudolph , a college professor, was a regional representative of the East Timor Alert Network and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He was awarded the prestigious Cheryl Rosa Teresa Doran Prize upon graduation from McGill University’s faculty of law; has worked at one of the world’s largest public accounting firms; and, has taught at McGill University. His political quizzes are here.

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