After the Beilin-Peres clique brought Fatah from Tunisia and installed it in the West Bank as a nominal peace partner, Fatah concentrated on embezzling foreign aid and in this way sought to centralize power, rather than dispersing it to create a support base. Fatah did not evolve into a popular party, but became a group of conspirators admired by masses. Popular mood changes rapidly, and Fatah cannot form a viable backbone for Palestinian statehood.

Fatah hijacked the PLO. In doing that, it was helped initially by Egyptians and Jordanians who feared the radical and uncontrollable PLO. Fatah’s situation in the 1960s is relevant now: at that time, Fatah was really a moderate organization of talkative university activists. They talked, however, of insurrection. When the PLO actually began the insurrection, Fatah had to follow suit in order to maintain its credibility. So the moderate demagogues often shift to radicalism. Abbas is moderate now, but his speeches addressed to Arabs are still full of the radical, we-are-waiting-for-our-chance rhetoric. When Hamas, PIJ, and others act daily against Israel, Abbas will have to make good on his promises to the Palestinians and start fighting Israel as well. Now Fatah acts indirectly, through its Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade wing. Palestinians understand that Fatah and Al Aqsa Martyrs are the same group, but Israeli and Western supporters of the peace process can comfortably tell their voters that Fatah abstains from terrorism. But at some point, if a peace treaty with Israel is not signed, Fatah will either be forced to engage in terrorism directly or pass away in the polls.

In practical terms, it doesn’t matter whether Fatah fights willingly or not. Egypt entered the 1967 war rather unwillingly. In fact, the Egyptian army fought Fatah’s armed wing, Assifa, around 1965, charging that the Palestinians drew Egypt into the war with Israel before Egypt was “fully prepared,” a euphemism for “don’t bother us.” Nasser was working on his pet idea of Arab unification, and both Israel and the Palestinians fell out of his sphere of immediate interests. But willingly or not, Arab leaders follow their rhetoric and eventually fight Israel.

Fatah and Hamas don’t fight for real: look at the massive amounts of ammunition expended with next to no casualties. When the Palestinian internecine fighting was for real, thousands of casualties were incurred in battles between Fatah and PFLP-GC and other factions.

Hamas and Hezbollah marked a new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was easy for Israel to uproot the PLO from the West Bank (a few hundred leaders) and Lebanon (a few thousand guerrillas). The Jordanian and Lebanese governments tacitly approved of Israel’s intervention, as they were fed up with the PLO. Hamas and Hezbollah, on other hand, are intertwined with the population. They are impossible to fight without massive civilian casualties, and aren’t susceptible to being uprooted by exiling a handful of their leaders. This is not yet a popular war on par with Vietnam, but it is close to it—the polls show 30-50 percent approval ratings for Hamas and Hezbollah. On a positive note, popular movements tend to turn inward. As long as they can maintain popularity by catering to the supportive population rather than fighting, they opt for peace. Both Hamas and Hezbollah will preserve animosity toward Israel, but will increasingly occupy themselves with domestic affairs. Both Hezbollah and Hamas have tremendously decreased the number of cross-border attacks on Israel, and almost ceased them after coming to power. Even Hamas’ semi-independent Izz ad-Din Kassam military wing refrained from significant attacks on Israel until forced to adopt a militant posture by the continuing restrictions Israel imposed on Gaza following Hamas’ takeover.

Hamas remained in power after the Gaza war, but perhaps Israel can claim victory based on humiliation? That would be a plausible stance had we stopped the operation on its second day. After four hundred air sorties devastated all the Hamas infrastructure above the ground and much below it, Israeli deterrence was reinstated. The blow was unquestionably devastating, and the operation humiliatingly successful. The problem is, the Israeli government did not have the good sense to end the operation immediately.
The weeks of indecisive, aimless fighting established a new Israeli objective: to dislodge Hamas, or at least to end the weapons smuggling. None of these objectives was reached, and the operation was rendered a failure. Hamas survived Israel’s war against it and resumed its activities—thus, it rightly claimed victory.

There is a subtle difference between winning and not losing. In the war, Hamas’ objective was to survive rather than to destroy Israel. In that narrow sense, the terrorist group has won. Hamas also scored a victory against Israel in broader terms: far from humiliation, Palestinians exhibited samud, endurance in the face of suffering.

An important reason for the Israeli evacuation of Gush Katif was to stop the incessant Palestinian attacks; Jews fled the North over the rocket attacks from Lebanon; Sderot, struck with crude projectiles from Gaza, lost a significant portion of its population. On the contrary, Gazans continued their support for Hamas despite the destruction wrought on them by Israel. We can argue for ages that fleeing Jews acted reasonably while the immovable Arabs did not, but that discussion is irrelevant. Whether it is rational or not, the Gazans show great moral resistance to invading forces. In that regard too, they achieved moral victory.

Could Israel have denied Hamas (and Gazans generally) their success? One option was already discussed, a short and humiliating aerial assault. Another option was craved by many IDF soldiers in Gaza: to press on and destroy Hamas in its holes. On the ground, many soldiers wanted none of the government’s political games and screamed to push deep into Gaza. The government pulled them out and handed the victory to Hamas.

Some accuse Hamas of using human shields. Go on, accuse the British: they employed Arabs as human shields when entering Palestinian towns during riots. If the British are immoral, then you might want to reconsider your standards of morality. Not long ago, the Israeli Supreme Court barred IDF from using Arab human shields, a decision which greatly endangered Jewish soldiers. If anything, it is more moral to use one’s own for a human shield than enemy civilians; Hamas uses its own people, most of them willingly. The human shield tactic is fairly safe for participants because IDF refrains from firing at houses full of Palestinian civilians. Israel fulminates at this tactic precisely because it is so efficient. Hamas does not even violate the rules of war by deploying human shields because the affected civilians are not really endangered.

It is not generally true that Hamas fights without uniforms; sometimes it does. What would the uniforms change? An armed Arab is clearly a target, uniformed or not. Many Hamas guerrillas wear flak jackets, which are as good for identification as uniforms. When IAF bombs Gaza, the pilots don’t see uniforms—and most of the collateral damage occurred during air strikes. In many areas, IDF troops received an order to shoot at anything that moves, whether uniformed or not.

Israeli newspapers ridiculed Hamas leaders for hiding in bunkers during the war while IDF chiefs also went underground in their Tel Aviv headquarters despite the absence of any danger whatsoever. While the IDF’s top brass hid in bunkers, Tel Aviv bomb shelters remained full of illegal African migrants, making them useless for Jews in case of attack.

In several cases, Hamas’ top commanders personally led their troops into battle. Heroism? A sign of disintegration, according to the Israeli media: the commanders led the charge in order to rally their cowardly troops. The media lied, despite hundreds of soldiers who testify to the contrary: Hamas guerrillas were unorganized but fought with a bravery verging on suicidal.

On this, too, the public opinion is warped. Jews want Hamas to fight suicidally, in uniforms and out of towns against helicopters, but ridicule the guerrillas for their suicidal urge. The detractors do not even know about the thousands of essentially suicidal missions undertaken by Jewish soldiers in WWII, the War of Independence, and less frequently since then. Hamas’ fighters are desperate, just as Jewish soldiers were six decades ago, and have much the same attitude toward their own and enemy civilians’ lives.

This brings us to Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israeli population centers. We do not need to argue whether Israeli civilians, most of whom are reservists—and reservists were called up in this war—are a legitimate target. In any war, population centers are targeted: any claims to the contrary stem from romanticism. Israel would gladly carpet-bomb Gaza and only refrains from doing so because of world opinion—which is anti-Israeli regardless.

Hamas is undoubtedly an enemy. So are Fatah, Egypt, and Lebanon, and just about every other Muslim entity. They hate us, we hate them, and there will be no permanent peace. The problem with Hamas is that we cannot destroy it: it is too deeply entrenched in Palestinian society. Israel can quench Hamas activity for some time with exhaustive police work, but do we want to re-occupy Gaza and govern the criminal neighborhood which Egypt so wisely abandoned? The only way to eradicate Hamas and other militant groups is by depopulating Gaza, which is not a workable option with any foreseeable Israeli government. Overwhelming retaliation also won’t work: after the worst retaliation plausible in January 2009, Gazan guerrillas quickly resumed their attacks.

Short of annihilation, we need an understanding with Hamas. That truce would not hold: some groups would violate it, and Israel will retaliate—but the border violence will remain tolerable.

The last argument has three problems. One, Israel already operates a truck-size scanner and can install similar ones at all the crossings to facilitate inspections. Two, Gazans can be made to pay for inspections; that is a normal practice at many customs. Three, arms smuggling is not a problem per se.

Hamas produced Kassam missiles from common pipes and fertilizer, and Israel has banned even ammonium fertilizer from Gaza. Smuggling from Egypt is generally more convenient than through Israeli crossings. And finally—let Hamas amass weapons. The problem is not their quantity, but Hamas’ willingness to use them. Israel can easily discourage Palestinians from firing rockets at her with massive retaliatory strikes. True, Hamas was firing at Israel even during the Gaza operation which was the worst practically possible retaliation, but then the group had no choice: it was either resistance or defeat. With the Israeli border peaceful, Hamas won’t be able to explain to its voters why it keeps firing at Israel and causes them retaliatory suffering.

Unlike the Fatah thugs whom Israel chose for peacemaking partners, Hamas is honest, brave, and predictable. It really cracked down on various militant groups in Gaza in order to stop them from firing at Israel in violation of the ceasefire. Fatah cannot enforce order in the West Bank, even with massive IDF help; but Hamas quickly established a sort of law and order in Gaza. Fatah submits to Israel, but Hamas members fought IDF bravely in hopeless battles. Fatah leaders talk to Israel and the West about the glorious prospects for peace—and talk war and Jew-hatred to Palestinian crowds. Hamas’ leaders are honest: they don’t promise Israel eternal peace because it is both impossible and contrary to Islamic teaching. But they offered us the next-best thing, a long-term truce.

At the height of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when Egypt pushed Hamas to accept a fifteen-year truce, Hamas only agreed to one year. This speaks volumes about Hamas’ keeping of its word: in the most difficult situation, the group didn’t lie to save itself.

The Israeli establishment trumpets the fact that Hamas rejects a Jewish state. Of course; every Muslim does. The difference is that Hamas says that openly.

Dealing with Hamas directly is the only way for Israel to produce a binding agreement which details each side’s responsibilities. The absence of such an agreement created divergent expectations of the 2008 ceasefire, which ultimately collapsed amid mutual accusations.

Surrounded by three hundred million Muslims and faced with a hostile world, Israel will never live in peace. But for a truce, we better choose a reliable partner—Hamas.

The IDF operation shows that people don’t learn from their mistakes; not Jews, at any rate. We had exactly the same problem in the two Lebanese wars: to conquer is easy, but to maintain the quiet is impossible. Israel can bomb everything into dust, but guerrillas lurk in devastated buildings. They have the advantages of surprise, human shields, and human rights. Most of all, they have time on their side: in a few days and probably immediately, the world will start pressing Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Israeli Arabs have already erupted in riots. Hamas will come out from its tunnels and claim victory. The US-trained Fatah battalions will prove powerless against the lawless Hamas guerrillas—or transform into a lawless bunch themselves.

An Israeli attack can destroy Hamas’ shacks. What about PIJ, PLFP, and PRC, who don’t have many buildings to retaliate against? There are militant clans such as the Dughmushes which span residential neighborhoods; conceivably, an army concerned with human rights is powerless against them.
There are several ways to defeat deeply entrenched guerrillas. The most historically common and reliable way is depopulating their living-area; the Israeli government has not the guts to do that.

Then there is the police way: occupy the place and start hunting down the militants. Sharon did that successfully when he was Gaza’s military governor. A police operation is inherently long-term, and requires full control of the territory and tens of thousands of agents. In short, the disengagement should be reversed, Gaza re-occupied, and Jewish soldiers endangered daily in urban combat. The Israeli government has no guts for that, either. Leftists believe everything has a solution, and are loathe to admit that some situations take centuries to settle down.

Also, there’s the SLA way, or quislings’. Israel propped up the South Lebanon Army to do the most dirty work against the Palestinians. But in Gaza we lack natural associates—every group is against us. If Jews prop up Fatah, Palestinian voters won’t forget their collaboration; a short-term victory would spell long-term defeat for Fatah. Even if Fatah fights and—unrealistically—destroys Hamas, it cannot touch PLFP and PRC, which are PLO-type secular nationalist fighters.

Machiavelli also discussed the theoretical option of winning an enemy to your side with goodness, but I cannot imagine what Jewish goodness short of sailing off to Canada would placate Hamas.

Whether Hezbollah would support Hamas with concurrent attacks is a matter of guesswork. Probably not, as Syria doesn’t want to antagonize Israel too much, and Lebanese government—which is now one with Hezbollah—is afraid of massive retaliation. Palestinian terrorist groups in Lebanon can launch rockets at Israel sporadically.

The Israeli operation in Gaza will confer international legitimacy on Hamas the way the Second Lebanese War conferred it on Hezbollah. From a terrorist group, Hamas becomes a recognized combatant, and thus a legal army in its own right. Today was the first time that the prime minister’s office confirmed that a ceasefire with Hamas had in fact existed. Before then, Israel denied any formal agreement with Hamas, and referred to it as an understanding only.
Gazan civilians, largely immune from Israeli attacks, have no reason to rescind their electoral support for Hamas.

In military terms, the operation is very far from being successful yet. A thousand-plus Palestinian casualties have already provoked the world’s outcry, even though the collateral deaths have been remarkably few. Destroying all the security compounds in Gaza hardly diminished Hamas’ arsenals—the Muslim group would be stupid to store its weapons inside the obvious targets of Israeli attacks. The demolition of all the police installations in Gaza increases the chaos and works against Hamas’ year-long attempt to instill any kind of order in the unruly territory.

After the first shock, Palestinian guerrillas will re-group and ready themselves for the IDF invasion. At best, the army won’t repeat its glaring errors of 2006—such as sending tanks into urban combat without helicopter cover—and will sap the road before the advancing tanks. But Hamas has stocked significant arsenals of anti-aircraft rockets, which are useful against Israeli helicopters. IDF didn’t equip most of its tanks with active defense, and they remain vulnerable to cheap RPGs.

Hamas will increase its rocket attacks on Israel, and more importantly, their precision and deadliness. Today’s rocket-toll of ten casualties is very high by the standards of the ceasefire period. As IDF pushes rocket launching squads away from the border, they will start using deadlier Grad-type missiles.
As the IAF runs out of targets in Gaza, Olmert’s government will have to declare an interim victory and accept a ceasefire, or invade Gaza. The last option is not election-friendly for Kadima because of the potential personnel losses and absence of a clear-cut victory. A large-scale invasion of Gaza is unlikely: Israel will stick to the discredited shock-and-awe tactics.

Alternatively, Down with Gaza.

Hamas can easily achieve publicity and political advantage by attacking Israeli soft targets: Jews, Jewish businesses, and community centers abroad. Protecting them all is impossible. Faced with persistent attacks, American Jews would pressure Israel to accept whatever concessions Hamas demands.

Surely Hamas has plenty of means for low-level terrorist attacks against Jews in many countries, but especially in Western Europe and Latin America. Surely Hamas understands that Israel won’t summarily retaliate against Palestinians. Hamas leaders are mostly hardened operatives, unlike the Fatah hoodlums, and most of them don’t fear targeted assassination. It is clear from the February rocket attacks on Sderot that Hamas guerrillas refused to scale down their offensive to avoid the targeted assassinations Israel threatens them with.

Israeli intelligence capabilities abroad are limited in comparison to the free pass Shabak enjoys in the West Bank. Hamas would find foreign attacks on Jews much easier than operations in Israel.

The relations between Israel and Hamas imply a high degree of cooperation. Shabak now intercepts 99 percent of terrorist attacks. Even accounting for the immense Israeli intelligence network in the territories, it is incredible that the Palestinians can carry out just one suicide bombing per year. Only small numbers of terrorists participate in the planning, and discovering a mole after a few failed operations should not be a problem. Evidently, Hamas and other terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, willingly limit their operations to the level acceptable both to Israel and their supporters.

Nothing precludes Hamas from proclaiming Palestinian statehood in Gaza. The recent breach of border with Egypt demonstrates that Hamas is willing to risk alienating its major sponsor. Even though Hamas depends on Egypt for all its logistics, it still initiated a major crisis and presented the Egyptians as Israeli collaborators who blockade Gaza. Hamas won’t care about Muslim opposition to Palestinian statehood (Muslim governments depend on the burning Palestinian issue to sublimate the energies of their own radicals, and don’t actually want a Palestinian state). Someone like Haniyeh or Mashaal would love to go down in the annals of Palestinian history as the founder of their state before Israel assassinates him; still, they do not proclaim independence.

Hamas offered Israel a long-term truce. Any Muslim who says differently is a liar: Islam positively forbids a non-Islamic state in this land, and Muslims may recognize the conquerors only temporarily. Hamas, therefore, offers as much as it can under Islamic law. Hamas is an honest, and in its own way, decent Islamic organization, unlike the Fatah thugs.

Hamas was the first Palestinian organization which tried to enforce order in Gaza, and could succeed—but independent and Fatah-supported militias refused to submit, and Hamas shrunk from civil war in Gaza. Stuck between Israeli sanctions, local militants, and a discontent population, Hamas cannot do any better.

Hamas refrained from attacking Israel for long time. The attacks attributed to Hamas are actually perpetrated by the Izz ad Din Kassam Brigades loosely connected to Hamas. There is no way Hamas can give an order to the Kassam Brigades to stop shelling Israel. Their relations are cooperative rather than hierarchical. The militants have no part in the diplomatic process and naturally resent being left out of the game; so they enter the game with rockets. The cycle of violence around Gaza is self-perpetuating: minor violence from Gaza, sanctions and reprisals from Israel, more attacks, more sanctions—until it’s hard for everyone to stop.

Israel has no alternative to negotiating with Hamas. Fatah is a bubble. It always was a bubble, a one-man operation. Hamas can easily replace assassinated leaders, but Fatah cannot. Except for Abbas, Barghouti, and a handful of others Fatah has no popular figures. Palestinians support Hamas as an organization, but support Abbas as an individual leader. Fatah has amply demonstrated that it cannot enforce security in the West Bank even with Israel’s help. For some odd reason Israel punishes Gaza (where Hamas tries to end the attacks), but rewards the West Bank (where Fatah bankrolls the terrorists).

It is a big question whether Israel needs peace with Palestinian Arabs. But if she does, then she must talk to Hamas.

Previously, Egypt blamed Israel’s control of the Egypt-Gaza border for the Palestinian troubles. Later, EU border monitors were the scapegoat for the hardships. But after the brave EU monitors fled the Rafah Crossing following Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Egypt appeared one on one with the Palestinians.

For some time, Egypt attempted to gloss over the obvious PR disaster: the major Arab country cooperating with Israel to oppress the Palestinians. Hamas had to keep quiet on the matter in return for Egypt’s hands-down attitude toward border security. Rafah was closed for commercial shipment, but Hamas enjoyed a free flow of weapons and contraband goods through tunnels from Egypt.

Israel turned up the heat on Egypt by pushing it to close the tunnels. After that measure strained the Egypt-Hamas relationship, Israel completely blockaded Gaza, and left Hamas no choice but to abandon its tacit cooperation with Egypt. Hamas correctly chose the PR effect over being nice to Egypt, and blew up the border barrier.

The border debacle placed Egypt in an exceedingly uncomfortable situation: Egypt pushed Gaza’s Arabs, besieged by Israel, back into the blockaded ghetto. Not even Mubarak’s regime, simultaneously harsh and popular, can withstand such a PR assault for long.

Egypt realized it had to divest from Gaza decades before Israel followed suit. Gaza cannot form a viable state—throngs of uprooted refugees make it ungovernable, Arabs cannot maintain high-end agriculture there like Jewish farmers to make Gaza self-sufficient, and agriculture cannot employ most Gazans.

Egypt has a great interest in isolating Gaza’s throngs. Just like the PLO destabilized Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, Gazans would destabilize Egypt if allowed there. Egypt has a hard time battling the local Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak loves to see his radical Muslims venting their feelings on the Palestinian issue. The last thing he wants is for Hamas, the militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Qassam Brigades—the violent offshoot of Hamas—to roam Egypt.

Sinai is Egypt’s ungovernable soft underbelly, flush with criminal Bedouin and militant members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Little has changed there since pharaonic times: the vast mountainous spaces are not susceptible to police or limited military control. Hamas in Sinai is Mubarak’s nightmare. If radical Muslims take hold of Sinai, Egypt would rather abandon the place, or even cede it to the Palestinians, rather than try enforcing the law there and suffering Israeli diplomatic and possibly military pressure for Islamist actions originating from Sinai. Egypt’s response to a Hamas invasion or infiltration is unpredictable because it entirely depends on one man’s—Mubarak’s—mind. The response could be anything from giving the Gazans Sinai to crushing them with tanks; intra-Arab atrocities are a brothers’ quarrel.

Hamas’ response is also unpredictable. Hamas might realize its threat to march half a million Gazans through the border with Israel, marching perhaps on Sderot. Rallying them would be difficult: Gazans breached the border with Egypt for commerce. Much smaller numbers would be available for a purely ideological intrusion into Israel; many will doubt the feasability of plundering Sderot.

Hamas will try keeping the border with Egypt open at least for a trickle of goods and migration, if not wide open. If Hamas succeeds, the situation in Gaza will quickly normalize, greatly improving Hamas’ ratings. Given the threat of another mass breach, Egypt would probably allow minor traffic to and from Gaza.

Egypt has normalized its relations with the almost-nuclear Iran, and Iran supports Hamas. If Egypt’s border with Gaza remains open, Iran will sneak in with fuel, money, and not-so-clandestine weapons deliveries. Egyptian charities, too, will deliver foodstuffs and fuel to Gazans.

Hamas’ stake in keeping the border with Egypt open is huge. The stake amounts to the difference between Hamas’ victory and its demise. In breaching the border, Hamas again proved itself a capable, ingenious, daring organization. Fatah is dull, doomed, and incapable of such brilliant operations.

Israel can do little to pressure Egypt into completely closing the border with Gaza. America can do more, but it still cannot force Egypt to blockade the Arab enclave indefinitely.

We may not like Hamas, but there is no alternative to negotiating with it.

Two types of religious movements evolve into military forces: truly mad fanatics and/or militants who are incidentally religious. Ayatollahs fall into the first category, the Taliban into the second. Hamas occupies the unsustainable middle ground. It is a moderate Islamic organization which only looks radical to atheistic Israeli analysts and secular Fatah gangsters. Unlike the Taliban, Hamas lacks long-term military experience. Hamas’ security achievements in Gaza are therefore disappointing. Hamas predictably failed on economic issues—who can expect economic genius from Islamists?—and nothing less than a genius can help Gaza’s economy. Hamas, however, had a slight chance of imposing order on Gaza—and failed. Hamas initially cleansed Gaza’s streets of unorganized violence and arranged a truce with Gaza’s organized criminal groups, most notably the Dughmushes. But Hamas seems incapable of such sweeping security measures as would be required to end Fatah’s insurrection in Gaza. Assisted by Israel, Fatah is poised to engage Hamas in a terrorist war, with car bombings, rocket attacks, shootings, and peaceful protests. Arafat needed an immense security apparatus to subdue rival factions. Hamas is less brutal and artful than Arafat, and refrains from mass arrests and assassinations. But nothing less will preserve its power. Common Gazans voted for Hamas as an alternative to thuggish Fatah; failure to deliver will turn them away from Hamas. Gazans now perceive Fatah as an Israeli proxy capable of opening the borders, re-enabling the massive flow of aid, and possibly even giving them back the Israeli jobs they lost after the outbreak of the Second Intifada.

Hamas is too soft to impose its power on Gazans. Elections will allow Hamas to end the impasse created by its takeover of Gaza while saving face: it will step down according to the wishes of Gaza’s people, not Fatah’s. It is unlikely that Israel will end her support for Fatah or economic repressions against Gaza. Unless Hamas miraculously radicalizes, it will lose power. And Israel will lose the real peace partner.

Terrorists can afford irresponsibility. They hide among civilians, accept retaliation against population and infrastructure, and pile up unrealistic demands. Hamas the terrorist group dreamed of control over Gaza. Days after taking over the place, Hamas faces drastically new situation: responsibility. Weeks ago, Hamas could recklessly fight Israel while leaving routine municipal job to Fatah. Suddenly, it is Hamas who must care of the transformers kicked out in Israeli retaliatory raids. Gazans now hold Hamas responsible for uninterrupted water and power supply from Israel, for the open border crossings, for continued foreign aid. Hamas is forced to abandon its terrorist ambitions and behave like a government. Iranian government, one of Hamas’ sponsors, utterly disregards economic needs of its citizens and ignores sanctions, but huge Iran with massive oil exports can sustain a period of hardship; Gaza cannot. Two weeks of blockade will force Gazans into the Bronze Age they claim they live in Palestine from. Like the PLO years ago, Hamas has either to abandon its patriotic rhetoric and accept Israel or provoke sanctions which will make it unpopular.

Hamas did not plan to take over Gaza. Internecine violence escalated blow-for-blow until Fatah tried to assassinate Haniyeh and Hamas reacted to the attempt. Fatah’s collapse in Gaza surprised Hamas which only meant to retaliate in style, not accomplish a coup. Hamas’ claims of Fatah’ deliberately withdrawing to stage Hamas’ coup are not entirely off the mark. Abbas hardly lured Hamas into the trap, but he and Fatah commanders knew they have no stake in Gaza. Abbas was only too happy to leave that giant inner city to Hamas. Neither Egypt nor Israel wanted to rule over the Palestinian throngs in Gaza; Abbas, too, would love to have a Palestinian state without Gazans.

After the unwanted takeover, Hamas acted to return to the previous situation. Haniyeh immediately offered to call on his supporters to cease the fire. He went so far as to propose a Hamas-free government of independent technocrats. Hamas cried of united Palestine. But it will be very hard for Haniyeh to get Gaza off his hands. Fatah will ask for a humiliating settlement which removes Hamas from the Palestinian political scene.

Hamas is close to hysteria. Decades of patient struggle are wasted through a single wrong move, the takeover of Gaza. Hamas’ hawks, unable to deliver positive returns, call for the total war with Fatah. Hamas politicians implore Egypt to accept their unintended rule in Gaza; closing of the Egyptian border is one of their many nightmares. Fatah, not Israel blockaded Gaza by requesting cessation of gasoline deliveries. Hamas fired no rockets on Israel after the takeover – only Fatah’s forces do to provoke Israeli reprisals.

Hamas resembles Taliban: a group of militant fundamentalists taking over a state. But Gaza is critically different from Afghanistan: in Gaza, there is no place to hide. Mullah Omar was very moderate in foreign relations, and even fought drug production, the main income source of Afghans. But, being a fundamentalist, Omar could not refuse to host the very Islamic Osama. In minuscule Gaza, almost any guerrilla group is a potential threat to Hamas. Hamas will annihilate competing militant groups, and Israel can easily extinguish the others. There is no danger of Talibanization of Gaza under Hamas. Rather, Hamas will go the way of its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, to become a relatively moderate Islamic organization.
Hamas can turn the tables at any moment by welcoming the Jews back to Gush Katif, to live under Hamas’ protection. Many will go.

Leaving Gaza to Hamas is insufficient. Israel should allow Hamas to finish off Fatah in the West Bank. Then let Jordan deploy its peacekeeping forces in the West Bank. After Hamas and Fatah exhaust each other, with no political infrastructure of Palestinian statehood in place, Jordan will annex Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank into confederacy. Israeli will be left with Jerusalem, settlements, and possibly with Hebron.

Israel is utterly wrong to support Fatah. Peace with quislings is worthless. Israel signed a peace treaty with Amin Gemayel of Lebanon only to see it denounced months later. A peace treaty with Fatah will allow Israel to withdraw from the territories – which she could do anytime without the treaty. Fatah cannot and doesn’t want to crack down on anti-Israeli militants.
Hamas won elections in the West Bank. Aiding Fatah tremendously discredits America and Israel in the Muslim world: for all the rhetoric, the West aids mobsters against a democratically elected party. Palestinians hate Fatah – a bunch of gangsters, racketeers. Hamas, though our enemy, is way more decent than Fatah.
Unlike Fatah, Hamas will not readily sign a peace treaty, but it can offer Israel something more important – a de facto peace.

The West Bank and Gaza had long developed into distinct cultural entities. The West Bank Palestinians are closer to the Jordanians than to the Gazans. Gaza developed into a huge inner city permeated by crime, welfare, radicalism, youth bulge, and unemployment. The West Bank and Gaza cannot form a single state; Gaza can hardly be incorporated in any state at all. Gaza was a liability for the Palestinian state all along: disconnected from the West Bank, susceptible to Israeli whims, and full of the worst kind of Palestinians who are themselves arguably the worst kind of Arabs.

The only option for Palestinian statehood is declaring a state in the West Bank immediately, before Fatah disintegrates and Hamas takes over the government. The Arab countries, however, don’t want a Palestinian state, but rather the burning Palestinian issue. Accordingly, they are pushing Fatah to accept the Hamas-majority government. Such a government would spell the death of Fatah: bereft of funding and legal status for its militia, Fatah would quickly lose militants, adherents, and civil servants to Hamas. Then add to the equation the Arab mentality of siding with victors and fearing association with losers for fear of retributive massacres. Egypt can run a Taliban-style operation: foster a Palestinian army and pass it through the Egypt-Gaza border to fight Hamas. Even if Egypt decides to run such an operation in conjunction with the US instead of accommodating Hamas, Fatah is the least likely candidate for the nucleus of the new army. Fatah was a weak organization all along. Arafat merely channeled donations and assassinated competitors. Fatah has never evolved into a true guerrilla organization but has mostly just claimed credit for the operations carried out by splinter groups. Arafat was virtually no-one in Tunisia – exactly the reason Shimon Peres brought him back to Palestine; Peres needed a Palestinian dummy to sign a peace treaty with. Hamas, on the contrary, was painstakingly developed as a grassroots organization with a lot of popular support.

Hamas’ takeover of Gaza fulfills Israel’s wildest dreams. The Hamas rule brands the Palestinians as terrorists, shows them incapable of statehood and hostile to Israel, and removes the peace process from the agenda. The worst thing Israel could do now is to invade Gaza to clean out Hamas for Fatah’s benefit and to justify Israeli leftists and the American Administration bent on peace with Palestinians.

A hazardous guess is that Hamas and Fatah will split Palestine for now, with Abbas enthroned in the West Bank and Haniyeh in Gaza. Weak Abbas will be further swayed by Jordan’s king Abdullah and, in the best-case scenario, will accept confederation with Jordan with himself as the West Bank viceroy. Gaza will become a terrorist base and a zoo for the world media. At some future time, Israel will be forced to cleanse Gaza of Hamas as she has regularly cleansed the West Bank of the PLO before.
Israel would be wrong to support Fatah except in the context of a confederation with Jordan. Such a confederation reduces the issue of Judea and Samaria from the basis of Palestinian statehood to a border dispute with amenable Jordan. If the confederacy doesn’t work out, Israel would want Hamas to permeate the West Bank to end the peace process and justify annexation of wide security zones.

Israel’s current reflexive moves aimed at bolstering Abbas are wrong. Hamas already expropriated huge amounts of Israeli, Egyptian, and American weapons stored at Fatah’s bases in Gaza. Money given to Abbas will only relieve the unpaid Palestinian civil servants’ pressure on Hamas. Supporting phonies is not a viable policy, in any case.