Too late

October 18th, 2007

The fourth in this week’s series of postings on The Economist’s correspondent’s diary

Why Hamas is here to stay

WHAT I’ve heard these past three days is much like what I’ve heard before. The Israeli checkpoints inside the West Bank divide it into several separate mini-enclaves, crippling it economically. It’s been made worse by the recent restrictions on trade in and out of Gaza, where many firms used to sell a goodly proportion of their wares.

Moreover, this isn’t likely to change much. Israel can get rid of some of the less important checkpoints, but not the big fixed ones surrounding the main cities: they’re too crucial to its security. And if just one suicide bomber slips through the net, all the old checkpoints will go back up, and more besides.

So there’s no point in hoping for a miraculous economic revival in the West Bank—the first plank of the plan for strengthening Mr Abbas.

A second way to strengthen Mr Abbas would be to give Palestinians hope that he can really get a peace deal with Israel. But Israel won’t talk timetables for peace, because it says Mr Abbas isn’t strong enough to deliver on his promises. It’s a catch-22.

As for the third aspect of the plan—shutting Hamas down—it has a terrible feeling of déjà vu. This all happened a decade ago. Israel told the PA, then as now run by Fatah, to go after Hamas, which opposed the Oslo peace accords.

The PA arrested and tortured hundreds of Islamists. Some died in jail. Fatah stayed in power and grew used to being in charge. It became ever more corrupt. The peace talks failed. The intifada exploded. Ten years later Hamas won the elections by a landslide.

Indeed, some of the Islamists I’ve spoken to say this is worse than a decade ago: that the PA is now going after Hamas’s institutions and charities, trying to wipe it out completely. This is bad news. Hamas is the main reason that the real extremists, the al-Qaeda jihadist types, have hardly made inroads in Palestine. It gives Palestinians who are sick of Fatah a mainstream Islamist alternative. If it is suppressed, more of those people will end up with the jihadists.

This is something I’ve been trying to get across in the paper. I’ve felt from early on the West and Israel had the wrong approach to Hamas—a mixture of head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge its popularity, and simple-minded attempts to make it go away.

The boost-Abbas plan is the latest example. The plan assumes that if Hamas gets weak enough, it will magically disappear and Fatah will take over. But though Hamas is losing popularity, it’s too powerful in Gaza: nothing can eject it short of a full-scale civil war, and even then it could well win.

Of course, the West (America in particular) wants to stop political Islamism from gaining a foothold. It fears a communist-style domino effect across the Middle East, and with good reason. But the West hardly managed to stop communism, which took control of countries mainly by means of coups, and political Islamism, as a ground-up popular movement, is even more resilient. It’s been building up over years of despotism and misrule in the Middle East.

It may burn out one day, like many other trends, but all the rest of the world can influence for now is whether it develops in a more or less extreme direction. There’s no shortage of ideas for a more creative approach that would encourage the moderates in Hamas instead, but everything up to now has strengthened the extremists.

The trouble is, it may be too late. When Hamas was in power it refused to recognise Israel, but offered it a 50-year peace deal. Israel could have gambled that after 50 years of peace no Palestinian would support a leadership that wanted to go back to war. The time for that is past.

The problem is no longer just American and Israeli resistance. The brutality of the fighting in Gaza made something in Fatah snap. What I’ve been hearing from once-conciliatory Fatah leaders is a visceral hatred of Hamas. “They are a different culture,” one told me recently, with the tone I imagine a British Empire official using about African “savages”. If nobody works on making these two patch up their differences, there isn’t going to be a Palestinian state.

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