On Tuesday, the State Department announced that the Obama Administration intends to work with the new Palestinian unity government of President Mahmoud Abbas, which now includes Hamas, the militant organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. To satisfy critics, the United States said that the new government would have to adhere to a set of international stipulations, agreed upon in 2006: it must recognize Israel, reject terror, and honor previously signed agreements. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Associated Press that he is “deeply troubled” by the Administration’s decision to maintain ties to the unity government, and added, “The United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian President that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable.” Hamas, for its part, has never recognized Israel’s existence or renounced violence. Intriguingly, two of Netanyahu’s coalition partners, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi, reject the principle of Palestinian statehood and have never accepted restrictions on settlement contained in such past signed agreements as the 2003 Roadmap, but they supported Netanyahu, skeptically, through the recent negotiations mediated by Secretary of State John Kerry.
Netanyahu’s own party, the Likud, has routinely taken a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose attitude toward Abbas. When Gaza and the West Bank were split—Hamas expelled Abbas’s Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority officials in 2007—Likud leaders charged that Abbas’s rule was illegitimate, weak, and incapable of representing a divided Palestinian populace. When Abbas sought to reunite the Palestinian territories, he was accused of cavorting with terrorists. He was not a “partner” in the peace process.
Of course, Hamas has engaged in despicable acts of terror, from training and dispatching suicide bombers to launching missiles into Israeli civilian population centers. It has advanced a totalitarian Islamist vision and a Manichaean view of Jews. So Tuesday’s reunification agreement suggests one of two things. The first is that Abbas—who is seventy-nine and concerned about his legacy after Kerry’s unsuccessful nine-month initiative to broker peace—has decided to get out in front of the mounting anger in the Palestinian street about the failure of the talks and adopt something like Hamas’s harder line. The second is that Abbas simply has beaten Hamas at its own game, forcing it to recognize his authority and to accept his nonviolent, internationalist strategy. Both conclusions may be true to some degree, though most Israelis impulsively jump to the first. Which is truer?
“Abbas has not knocked out Hamas, but he is winning on points—he has the opportunity to extend the umbrella of nonviolence to Gaza,” Mohammad Mustafa, the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the economy, told me in Ramallah. A central player in both the old and new Palestinian governments, Mustafa, a former World Bank official, is also the head of the billion-dollar Palestine Investment Fund. “This is an agreement for real,” he went on. “Hamas’s situation has changed. The biggest factor is regional—especially Egypt. Hamas lost their alliance with Syria some time ago. But they had alternatives. Morsi”—Mohamed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian President—“made them feel comfortable. Tunisia, Turkey was a big ally, Iran was coming their way. Now there aren’t really many friends for Hamas.” He added that the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had “convinced Hamas that they really lost.”
Hamas’s biggest loss, Mustafa explained, was sustainable rule in Gaza. Its leaders found themselves in an economic hole, which only reunification with the Palestinian business community of the West Bank could pull them out of. “Losing Egypt meant they lost their gateway to the region,” he said. “They thought they could have their own small state. The Rafah crossing to the Sinai had opened. There was money from Qatar; oil from Egypt was almost free. Now they are in serious hardship. Their dream of a small, independent emirate in Gaza is not an option.”
But Mustafa is also convinced that Abbas has “played it right”—cultivating regional ties and, incrementally, strengthening the Palestinian Authority’s political legitimacy. “We joined the United Nations’s treaties”—against the protestations of Israel and the U.S.—“and didn’t make much progress initially. Some said Abbas would try negotiations, fail, and then wouldn’t be able to keep control of things. He would just fade away. In fact, he got credit for his efforts in many quarters. It was clear to all that negotiations did not fail because of him. And even Hamas saw that, in going to the U.N., he was not weak.”
The Palestinian government, presented as made up of technocrats, is led by Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, a former professor of English literature and the president of An-Najah University, in the West Bank, and is dominated by people close to Fatah, the faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization that Abbas took over from Yasir Arafat. That is no accident; Fatah, for all its corruption and petty intrigues, is the traditional political home of secular nationalists. Élite, Western-educated professionals—“technocrats”—such as Hamdallah and Mustafa may secretly admire Hamas’s “steadfastness,” but they fear its proposed mini-state as much as Israelis do.
Ammar Akker, the C.E.O. of Paltel, a billion-dollar Palestinian telecommunications company, strongly favors the unity deal. He surely wouldn’t if he thought it portended more armed insurgency. Akker is no stooge of the occupation: Paltel is well equipped to bid on projects in Jordan and Kurdish Iraq, but Israeli military restrictions (favorable to Israeli firms) prevent Paltel from providing crucial 3G services to Palestinian businesses. Akker told me that anxieties expressed in the Israeli press about the Palestinian Authority flirting with violence are misplaced. “Another intifada would destroy what we built,” he said.
Despite the Palestinian Authority’s many problems, including budget shortfalls and debts (including more than four hundred million dollars to the Israel Electric Corporation alone), the government is nowhere near collapsing. It is gaining international recognition as a state apparatus—the Pope’s trip last week to Bethlehem, in the West Bank, reaffirmed this. The Palestinian Authority also plays an essential role in facilitating investments in the developing West Bank. (Mustafa told me that he is currently seeking bids to build new power stations in Jenin and elsewhere, and to develop gas fields off the coast of Gaza.)
What’s more, Israel relies on the Palestinian Authority’s coöperation to maintain security. Israeli Army commanders and economic officials tell reporters that Israel could never reinstate direct administration of the territories. “We can’t punish them without punishing ourselves,” one Israeli official said. The Netanyahu government announced that, in view of the unity deal, it would hold back the payment of tariffs collected on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf. In reality, Israel has held back a mere twenty million dollars, to help pay off the electric bill. Even Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Army Chief of Staff during the first years of the al-Aqsa intifada—and now the leader of the Kadima faction in the Knesset—greeted the announcement in April of the Fatah-Hamas intention to form a joint government by telling Israeli radio that unity could make two-state negotiations easier, that sooner or later Israel would have to deal with Hamas.
The key is to draw Hamas into a nonviolent political process, much as Fatah was drawn in during the late nineteen-eighties, and, for that matter, as the remnants of Menachem Begin’s Irgun were after 1948. Khalil Shikaki, the preëminent Palestinian pollster and political analyst, believes that this is now possible. Hamas has the support of perhaps twenty-five per cent of the combined electorate, Shikaki told me. That could climb to fifty per cent if there is a return to naked repression and violence, but, for now, Abbas is stronger than he has been since his election, in 2005. He has shown no signs of wanting to abandon the strategy of respectability and nonviolence that has brought him to this point. “Under current circumstances, Abbas would win,” Shikaki said. “Hamas has to meet him halfway.”
In January of 2011, I had dinner with Mustafa in Amman, in Jordan. I asked him how, in view of what was unfolding in Gaza, he (and, by implication, Abbas’s leadership team in Ramallah) dealt with the obvious pressures. After all, I said, the development of any emerging economy was bound to produce serious inequalities between educated and not-so-educated people, which in turn could produce explosive tensions. But in the case of Gaza and the West Bank, I said, the tensions have an extra dimension, because the development and state-building are taking place under Israeli occupation. Hamas, for example, could argue that inequalities are the product of occupation, that the calm that serves development serves Israel, and that West Bank officials and entrepreneurs are quislings. Mustafa thought for a moment, then looked at me thoughtfully. “I have no Plan B,” he said.
Photograph of West Bank supporters of Mahmoud Abbas by Xinhua/eyevine/Redux.
