LAST UPDATED: 07/12/2014
A man stands guard during the funeral of two Palestinian gunmen killed by an Israeli air
strike in response to rocket fire launched at southern Israeli towns. Photo: REUTERS
"Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him eyeless in Gaza,”
said Samson of himself, bemoaning Delilah’s betrayal in John Milton’s
Samson Agonistes.
This week another eyeless prisoner appeared
in Gaza, only now the blind is the Philistine and its blindness is not
physical, but strategic, military and political.
Twenty-seven
years after its establishment in the wake of the first intifada, Hamas
arrived at this week’s showdown with the IDF in its worst strategic
situation ever. First, in 2012, it lost Syria –
its longtime ally and host – after having gambled on President Bashar
Assad’s defeat in his country’s civil war. Assad expelled Hamas
headquarters from Damascus, then proceeded to prove his eulogies
premature, and Hamas’s gamble a grave mistake. The movement’s
subsequent training of Syrian rebels has cemented Assad’s enmity.
Down
with Syria went its Iranian sponsor’s financial infusions and arms
shipments to Gaza, and also the cheerleading of Hezbollah, which this
week remained conspicuously quiet even as Gaza came under flames.
A
brainchild of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s strategic
relationship with previous president Mohamed Morsi was not a matter of
expediency. This alliance, unlike those with Syria and Iran, was as
natural and logical as North Korea’s with China, and Hamas therefore
cannot be faulted for having cultivated it. The
only problem is that Morsi has since been ushered out, and his
successors see in the Brotherhood a strategic threat.
This is also how they see Hamas, regardless of its collaboration with Islamist terror in Sinai.
Meanwhile,
Egypt’s wrath at Hamas is fully shared by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the
United Arab Emirates, all of which also loathe any threat to the Arab
world’s established regimes. Finally, Hamas managed to ruin its
fledgling harmony with the Palestinian Authority, just weeks after its
much-heralded announcement of a unity government with Fatah.
In
short, Hamas has isolated itself so hermetically that it is shunned by
monarchies and republics, Sunnis and Shi’ites, Iranians and Americans,
and a world that now sees Hamas as part of a trouble-making Islamist
international that runs from Nigeria through Iraq to western China.
Even Hamas’s last ally, Turkey, said little this week when the
Israel Air Force pounded targets in Gaza.
Though partly the
result of circumstances beyond its control, Hamas’s isolation is
largely self-inflicted, and reflects a lack of flexibility and
sophistication of the sort it must develop if it is ever to fulfill its
quest to lead a nation.
HAMAS’S MILITARY conduct, as of Thursday, suffered from the same lack of vision that has plagued its diplomacy.
The
rocket attacks had long lost their original advantage – surprise.
Everyone expected them, first and foremost the IDF. The firing of
hundreds of missiles in the first days of fighting, so repeatedly
intercepted and so comprehensively ineffective, has left the impression
that Hamas lacks imagination as well as poise, and is wasting
ammunition that will be more difficult to replenish under the nose of
Egypt’s new government.
The attempted raid on Kibbutz Zikim
Tuesday, where Palestinian frogmen were detected upon their emergence
from the water and killed soon after, was daring, but it underscored
Hamas’s transparency – as did its botched activation of an explosives
tunnel. The IDF’s targeted killing shortly before the raid of the
commander of Hamas’s Naval Commando showed that its intelligence about
the organization is better than realized.
In fact, the
fighting into which Hamas has maneuvered itself raises a simple
question: What does it want? If the idea was to seriously disrupt life
in Israel – it has failed. Yes, there is some damage to small
businesses, and some public events are canceled, but overall this is
not the London Blitz. People are going to work,
beaches are full, the shekel approached the week’s aftermath as
excessively strong as it entered it, and the Tel Aviv 100 Index, after
three days of moderate declines, returned to climb by Wednesday.
Apparently,
there was more spontaneity than premeditation in Hamas’s conduct,
reflecting frustration in the face of too many political dead ends.
Hamas’s effort since its establishment has been to gather maximum power while assuming minimum responsibility.
This
aim is what made Sheikh Ahmed Yassin avoid running against Yasser
Arafat in the 1996 presidential election. The strategy was to let Fatah
bend under the daily burden of feeding, employing and housing
millions, while offering assorted social services to the Palestinian
Authority’s disappointed citizens.
This has been Islamism’s
policy throughout the Middle East. It worked well until the moment that
informal power became formal power, and
responsibility could no longer be escaped.
That is what
happened in Egypt, when the Islamists reached power only to prove shorn
of contingency plans, and helpless in the face of economic problems
they were expected to address.
Morsi spent his time writing
an authoritarian constitution, while out the window gas lines sprawled
for miles and food became scarce. Had his thoughts focused on how to run
a country, he would have first cut Egypt’s exorbitant spending on food
and gas subsidies, and thus freed public finds and market forces.
Current
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this week did just that, thus
showing that whatever his measures’ success, his thoughts are focused
on how to govern.
Hamas, unlike its Egyptian mentors,
sustained its combination of maximum power and minimum responsibility
for years. While it avoided the presidential elections, the movement
ran candidates in local
elections, manning a third of Arafat’s municipalities with mayors who,
if asked why things were still bad, would point to the ruling Fatah.
Following
Arafat’s death in 2005, Hamas not only shunned but boycotted the
election that crowned Mahmoud Abbas president. In this way, it
undermined the president’s authority even before he assumed power,
preferring to let the people watch him arrive in office limping. At the
same time, Hamas ran for the following year’s legislative election,
where it won 74 seats as opposed to Fatah’s 45.
At that point
Hamas could no longer resist power’s temptation, and the following year
wrested Gaza from Fatah forcefully. The time to govern had thus
arrived, and Hamas would prove no better at this task than Morsi did in
Cairo.
Hamas’s economy, much like the PA’s, was built to
rely on a bloated public sector mainly fed by foreigners. The
difference was that the PA’s
feeders were Western, whereas Hamas’s funding originated with Middle
Eastern sources it has since lost, and passed through tunnels that
post-Islamist Egypt has demolished.
That is why in April,
Hamas struck its deal with the PA; it was the avenue to restore salary
payment to 42,000 employees. Yet that hope was soon dashed when salaries
seven months overdue did not arrive, and banks had to be closed
because angry customers were scuffling at their doors.
Hamas’s failure to make the transition from dissidence to governance became glaring.
The
abduction and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah
further unveiled the movement’s inability to part with its dissident’s
soul.
Faced with its nominal ally Abbas’s condemnation of
the abduction, and with his security service’s cooperation with Israel
in seeking its perpetrators, Hamas could not resist kicking the bucket
it had just
filled. Praising the abduction and attacking the PA president
vehemently, Hamas deprived its employees of the paychecks it had just
secured. Meanwhile, Hamas’s $4.6 billion budget sank $1.3b. into the
red, and unemployment, which last year reached 38.5 percent, climbed
even higher.
Hamas, then, wants money. It owes its employees,
whose wrath is intensified by the sight of 70,000 PA employees in the
Gaza Strip who continue to receive monthly salaries, though they don’t
actually work.
This could all have been different had Hamas
spent its seven years in power opening up Gaza for real business and
investment, creating real jobs and building a real city-state. With the
city’s seaside location and small population, this is very feasible.
Alas, in line with its diplomatic and military blindness, Hamas was
also economically eyeless, failing to cultivate new industry – other
than smuggling, tunnel digging and missile
production.
FROM ISRAEL’S viewpoint, all this is intra-Arab politics.
Yes,
in an ideal world, Israel would help Gaza create jobs and nurture an
economy. Israel has already been there and nine years after leaving
Gaza, has no illusions concerning its leverage over what is happening
there.
That is why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon this week avoided declaring Hamas’s
eradication a goal of Operation Protective Edge.
Instead,
Israel’s goal is modest: that Gaza mind its own business. This is what
it did until recently, and this is what it will soon return to doing –
as its chronic economic ailments receive, yet again, some more
symptomatic treatment, of the sort offered last month by Qatar when it
pledged $60 million for Hamas’s unpaid workers. Another potential
substitute for Hamas’s lost financing is Turkey, though Ankara will be
reluctant to further
antagonize Cairo.
Such bandaging, like all symptomatic
treatments, will of course be short-lived. For real surgery to happen, a
real surgeon would have to show up in the Strip and remove the tumor
in its brain. Just who might be able and willing to perform such
surgery remains unclear.
It certainly won’t be Israel, but it
might be someone from Egypt, the West Bank or Gaza – someone whose
seven years of intimacy with Hamas has left him as disappointed as
Samson was with Delilah.
www.MiddleIsrael.net; Twitter: @MiddleIsrael
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