For Hamas, logic led to cease-fire's end

By Stephen Farrell
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

RAMALLAH, West Bank: On the wall of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem on Monday was a stack of yellow Post-it notes pasted one on top of the next, with the number 10,048 scrawled on the top one. That was the number of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2001.

It was quickly out of date, and other Post-its will soon be stacked on top.

For Israel, the tally has prompted internal debate about how to counter the threat from Hamas's homemade rockets and those of other armed Palestinian factions.

For Hamas, the very existence of that number in an Israeli office is an achievement. As plumes of smoke rise from Gaza, it is Hamas that dominates the television news and newspaper headlines.

It is not only the publicity, but also the status conveyed on Hamas as the Palestinians' principal resistance. Its secular rival, Fatah, sits on the sidelines, marginal to the violence unfolding in Gaza, from which Hamas effectively expelled it at gunpoint in the summer of 2007.

The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it — can it — unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?

Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas's way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way.

And so it appears that Hamas turned its logic against its own cease-fire: Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that the truce had yielded few results. If there were no specific benefits — like freed prisoners or an end to Israeli blockages on Gaza — then the option, again, was a return to violence. It may also have calculated that the rockets into Israel — 60 in one day — would restore its status among Palestinians as the champion of "resistance" against the Zionist enemy, whose soldiers and settlers are no longer in Gaza within reach of Hamas's military wing.

A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling.

The outcome, for the moment, is far from clear because neither side has yet deployed the full arsenal available to it.

Some in Gaza believe Hamas wants Israeli soldiers to enter the Gaza Strip, because it has had 18 months to smuggle weapons in through tunnels from the Sinai since it seized control of the territory from Fatah. For the last several years, after Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005 and its erection of a barrier around the West Bank, it has been harder to strike at Israelis.

Israel, though, is aware of the risks and will not reflexively mount a large-scale military return to Gaza.

As Israeli tanks rumbled on the outskirts of Gaza and explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the night late on Monday, it is too early to gauge the effect the renewed violence is having on Palestinian opinion. The key issue is whether Palestinians will blame Israel for raining fire down upon them, as Hamas hopes. Or blame Hamas for provoking it, as Fatah, Israel and its Western allies hope.

Right now Palestinians are blaming Israel, loudly.

This weekend, the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida printed a black front page with a headline blaring: "1,000 Martyrs and Wounded in Saturday Slaughter."

More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, both scheduled roughly within a year.

At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.

Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. "Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was," he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.

Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported "neither one nor the other," complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.

A few miles north in Ramallah anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah's heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.

Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who has become a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush.

Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: "I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank."

Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.

But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style "resistance" with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.

"The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements," he said.

"But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says 'We want a political solution, let's reach an agreement,' it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people," Salah added.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, on Monday accused Hamas of inflicting suffering upon its fellow Palestinians. In a conference call with journalists he said the group was "holding hostage" ordinary Palestinians in Gaza just as it was a quarter of a million citizens in southern Israel.

But Hamas has in the past proved adept at deflecting such barbs. "Israel and America say no to Hamas. What do you say?" read one Hamas 2006 election banner. The Palestinians gave one answer then. Whether they give the same answer in 2009 or 2010 may depend on how the next few weeks play out.