Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood continues on the diplomatic front with the opening of two sets of talks this week in Cairo. One set will have Egypt brokering discussions with Fatah and Hamas on the future of governance in the Gaza Strip, while the other will see Egyptian and Palestinian Authority (PA) representatives shuttling between Hamas and an Israeli delegation.
Although Egypt brokered the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that ended 50 days of rockets flying out of Gaza and Israel, which devastated the tiny strip, it cannot have escaped Hamas’ notice that Egypt has an agenda of its own—and it is shared with just about every other party involved.
A sign of what Hamas will face was displayed this weekend, as UN Middle East envoy Robert Serry worked on achieving an agreement for 250-500 international observers to monitor reconstruction projects in Gaza. The purpose of the monitors would be to ensure that all materials brought into Gaza, and all the work done with them, is exclusively used to rebuild the homes, infrastructure and public buildings that were destroyed by Israel’s recent onslaught. The UN would be working with Israel and the Palestinian Authority to guarantee that outcome.
Hamas is facing the consequences of the unity deal it agreed to back in April. At that time, Hamas was losing popularity in Gaza, was seeing what support it had in the Arab world evaporating, and found itself unable to pay civic employees. But the events of the summer changed things, at least for the time being.
Now Hamas is riding a wave of popularity after facing Israeli bombardment again and coming out battered but not broken. Qatar, whose support remains dubious, acted more supportive during the fighting. And, Hamas thought, the ceasefire arrangement would get the understandably disgruntled and desperate workers see some kind of paycheck. With Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas having angered many Palestinians by wavering sharply between public condemnations of the Israeli onslaught and continued cooperation with Israeli security in the West Bank, Hamas had reason to reconsider the unity agreement.
But it accepted the agreement, which now seems like a trap. Abbas is insisting that the unity government be allowed to take over the administration of Gaza. Hamas is surely aware that in that event, the PA would have to embark on a campaign to control the violence in Gaza as it did with the West Bank. In other words, even without agreeing to disarm Gaza—an Israeli demand—the PA would, in fact, do just that. And, with no elections currently scheduled, Hamas could find itself completely marginalized.
This is, without a doubt, exactly what Egypt wants. Certainly the leadership knows that any attempt to disarm Hamas and the other armed factions in Gaza would be met with resistance. But Hamas, at least, is still substantially weakened after the battle with Israel. Egypt might reasonably expect that this fact will lead to a different outcome than the 2007 battle between Fatah and Hamas, which ended in a decisive Hamas victory. Moreover, Abbas has very little legitimacy in Gaza, but if he becomes the Palestinian face of reconstruction and of a marked improvement in the lives of the people there, it would be enough to slowly drain more support from Hamas.
It may well be that, if successful, Egypt would press Israel to end its blockade of Gaza and even allow the construction of an airport and seaport there. This would create a comparative economic boom in the beleaguered Gaza Strip and could keep things calm in the region for an extended period. For Israel, the downside would be increased diplomatic pressure to get back to serious negotiations about a two-state solution. That is exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feared when the Palestinians struck the unity accord, and the reason why he manipulated the murder of three young Israelis to lead to a much broader attack on Hamas.
But Netanyahu also knows that if there is one thing Israel excels at it’s negotiating endlessly with no results. He also knows that Israel’s behavior in Gaza angered many leaders around the world, particularly with the repeated attacks on UN facilities and the blatant targeting of civilians. Israel’s denials and claims of accidental actions have been greeted with skepticism at best, even in Washington (everywhere, that is, with the obvious exception of the halls of Congress). Israel’s position is not nearly as strong as Netanyahu thought it would be when the fighting stopped. Therefore, it may be that Netanyahu will accept the Palestinian unity government if it can marginalize Hamas.
Egypt certainly will work hard to convince Netanyahu to do so. Netanyahu reaps some benefits from having Hamas, which maintains some degree of control over Gaza but is a frightening specter to Israelis. Israel also enjoys having the Palestinian body politic split between Gaza and the West Bank.
But Egypt, under its new-old regime headed by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is quite keen to wipe out what they see as the last vestige of Muslim Brotherhood political power in the region. Egypt gets no benefit from the Palestinian split, and in fact would probably prefer to see the PA under Abbas assume control of Gaza to sideline Hamas. The hope would be that such a PA would work with Egypt to strangle ties between Gaza and militant groups in the Sinai, enabling some indirect assistance in that endeavor from Israel.
But most of all, Sisi wants to wipe out Hamas as a player in the region. That’s not necessarily what Israel wants. But even if the PA once again controls Gaza, and the strip and the West Bank become one territorial unit again, that is a far cry from the circumstances that would create real pressure on Israel to end its occupation.
The UN simply wants to rebuild Gaza, although it’s not very happy with Hamas either, after the group was caught using UN facilities to store weapons. Still, Robert Serry is likely inclined to focus on humanitarian relief rather than regional politics. But in order to do that, it needs to work to ensure that Hamas is not involved in that reconstruction.
Hamas knows all of this, but cannot simply refuse to go to these talks just because they’re in Cairo. Without these negotiations, international relief will not come into Gaza. Egypt has them in a difficult spot.
But Hamas also must be expected to abide by the unity agreement it signed. It knew this was part of it, and if circumstances have made that agreement less palatable, that is the risk it took. What it needs to do now is press for elections as soon as possible, under the terms of that same unity agreement.
By the time such elections could be held, some of the luster will have come off of Hamas’ steadfastness over the summer. And, if it does agree to allow the PA to take over Gaza again, it will also likely be abdicating its position as the leading revolutionary group among Palestinians. From that point on, other factions will be raising weapons against Israel and, quite likely, the PA as well.
Egypt certainly believes that this will eventually lead to Hamas’ disappearance. More sober minds in Israel probably fear that this will strengthen more radical groups in the Palestinian Territories, and they are probably correct.
But in the last analysis, the Palestinians must be unified. In that future, Gaza can be helped and the Palestinians can at least potentially have a representative leadership. The pitfalls are many, and the motives of the various players are dubious to say the least. But the alternatives are all far less likely to produce progress.
Photo: The Prime Minister of Gaza Ismail Haniya (right), with Fatah official Azzam Al-Ahmad (middle), and Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzoq at the April 22, 2014 meeting to sign the Fatah-Hamas unity deal. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
For Secretary of State John Kerry, the good news this past week is that he has finally got Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to agree to talk directly about peace. The bad news is that Kerry now has the thankless task of delivering the [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
For Secretary of State John Kerry, the good news this past week is that he has finally got Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to agree to talk directly about peace. The bad news is that Kerry now has the thankless task of delivering the goods.
The Secretary of State is wasting no time in getting started. He has asked Ambassador Martin Indyk to coordinate the process for the United States. Indyk was US ambassador to Israel (twice), assistant secretary of state for the region and senior official on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. He knows the issues and the dramatis personae and is committed to a two-state solution. He has the needed confidence of key people on Capitol Hill and in the American Jewish community. His first test, however, will be to establish credibility with the Palestinians as an honest broker.
The negotiations will be unusual because the most viable solution is well-known, as it should be after 34 years’ efforts. (Yours truly was NSC representative when the talks first began in May 1979). Most diplomats who have been involved in the peace process agree that the best parameters for a two-state solution were laid out by President Bill Clinton in December 2000 (found here). A more detailed variation is the so-called Geneva Accord, designed by some former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
By these formulae, Israel would gain sovereignty over portions of the West Bank that include most of the Jewish settlements and swap an equivalent amount of Israeli land to the Palestinian state. Palestine would effectively be demilitarized and security arrangements would be devised. Jerusalem would become the capital of both states. Some compensation would be made for Palestinian refugees from the 1947-48 war. Arab states must bless the arrangements and end all calls of war against Israel.
Other matters of consequence include agreement on a political, economic and physical connection between the West Bank and Gaza, one of which can be found here. The Hamas leadership in Gaza must end the conflict with Israel and recognize it as a Jewish state.
NATO forces could be stationed in Palestine to help provide security, including against terrorism. And outsiders need to provide substantial aid and investments to the Palestinian state, to give it a chance to survive and for the people to have a chance at bettering their lives. NATO countries would agree to provide the former (troops) and the West and hopefully rich Arab countries would provide the latter (money). These are small prices to pay for ending this seemingly endless conflict.
The roadmap to peace-with-security is thus complex but relatively clear. Yet there is so far no indication that either side will make the compromises needed to reach an agreement. The corrosive issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is to be put off until later. Whether Israel will let Palestine share Jerusalem as its capital is far from clear. Nor is it clear that the PNA President, Mahmoud Abbas, can deliver on his part of a bargain, given the politics of the West Bank and Gaza.
Secretary Kerry has thus managed to lead the Israeli and Palestinian horses to water, but they so far lack the political will to drink. Nor is it clear that, if the process reaches the point of deal-cutting, President Barak Obama will assume the political onus of asking Israel to make concessions that will not sit well with some of the important domestic constituencies he needs to help him fulfill his legacy, which is in domestic and not foreign policy. He is not yet publicly invested in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, though he has given Secretary Kerry free rein to see what he can achieve. At some point, however, Obama will have to do some heavy lifting. Without his direct and resolute involvement, peace will not be possible. Ideally, he should table the Clinton Parameters as the bottom-line US proposal.
There are thus enough doubts to buttress skepticism that Secretary Kerry’s efforts will succeed. But there are even deeper concerns; the peace process can not take place in a political vacuum. For the PNA, it will be difficult if not impossible to reach any viable agreement with Israel unless Gaza is included, and that depends not just on Hamas’ cooperation (now non-existent), but also on Israel ending Gaza’s economic isolation which, ironically, strengthens Hamas politically.
Israel’s politics will be even more difficult. It faces three major security challenges that do not derive, at least primarily, from the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian agenda. The linchpin of Israel’s security is its treaty with Egypt, which provides reasonable confidence that Israel will not be successfully attacked by conventional forces of any possible Arab coalition. With Egypt’s current political turmoil, there is some question whether the treaty will hold. That is likely, but not guaranteed.
More important, Syria’s civil war has transformed its frontier with Israel from being one of the most stable in the region, based on a modus vivendi Israel reached with the current Syrian president’s father after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to being one of the most uncertain.
Then there is Iran, which many Israelis, including the current government, see as posing a mortal threat if it acquires nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is convinced that Tehran wants to do so and is not far from such a capability, as well as developing an Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that could reach the US. As he said a week ago on American television, he views the government in Iran, even with its new president, Hassan Rouhani (who will be subservient to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) as a “messianic, apocalyptic, extreme regime.”
With the security challenges Israel sees on three fronts, it is hard to believe that it will be politically or psychologically able to make the compromises needed to reach an agreement with the PNA, even though substantial majorities of Israelis and Palestinians want the conflict to be over and done with, so they can get on with their lives in a peace that has eluded them for decades.
This background has led many observers, myself included, to wonder why Secretary Kerry put the Israeli-Palestinian peace process at the top of his Middle East agenda — if not his global agenda. There is a rationale. If it were possible to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, at least some things would improve for the US elsewhere in the region, including limits on Iran’s ability to exploit its relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon and, though the connection is far less substantial, with Hamas in Gaza. The US would be far less likely to be chided by Arab governments over its support for Israel; one recruiting tool used by Islamist terrorists would at least be depreciated; and, not incidentally, America’s much-diminished stature as an effective political force in the region — in the eyes of friend and foe alike — could be refurbished.
But even if the peace process did miraculously lead to an agreement in relatively short order, it would not be enough to meet America’s strategic needs in the region. Leave aside Egypt, which, assuming the treaty with Israel holds, is now less consequential than the Levant or the Persian Gulf. The civil war in Syria is spreading to other parts of the region, where there are deep rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites spurred by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which toppled a minority Sunni government that had long dominated the Shia majority. This has led Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to try redressing the balance by supporting the Syrian rebels’ attempt to end minority Alawite (Shia) rule and bring the Sunni majority to power, even at the price of a worse bloodbath than now and major gains for Islamist extremists. President Obama, unfortunately, hastily declared two years ago that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go — and the White House repeated this demand this week — without first devising a policy to bring it about or to pursue some other alternative consistent with US interests, either in Syria or more broadly in the region.
Equally consequential for its strategic needs in the Middle East, the US has greeted the election of a new Iranian president with cold indifference, along with pressure from the House Foreign Affairs Committee to increase sanctions rather than make a gesture to the people of Iran. The administration has not signaled readiness to try moving beyond mutual hostility toward mutual accommodation. Nor is it willing to accept an obvious requirement of successful diplomacy: no nuclear deal with Iran is possible unless the US publicly recognizes that Iran, as well as the US, Israel and the Gulf Arabs, have some legitimate security interests.
In short, like Winston Churchill’s famous “pudding” that “lacked a theme”, the US still lacks a strategy in the Middle East that brings all the different elements together and charts a course that can meet America’s national interests throughout the region. Thinking strategically needs to be the first task. The second needs to be setting priorities, where Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking should not be at or even near the top.
Be that as it may, now that Secretary of State Kerry is on the verge of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to at least talk to one another, he and President Obama must turn their attention to the larger canvas. The US cannot profit from moving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process a few inches forward if Washington fails to meet more pressing requirements in the region that demand the coherent, committed, intelligent and strategic engagement of the United States, the only power that can even begin to bring some order out of the rising chaos.
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