As already happened in Iraq at the beginning of the millennium, USA and the European Union They are once again installed in fantasy as action plan to resolve the conflict Middle East. Both aspire to Palestinian National Authority (ANP) takes charge of Loop once the Israeli military offensive concludes, which is turning the Strip into an uninhabitable wasteland. This objective, theoretically essential to be able to launch a peace process, is accompanied by a second premise: Hamas cannot play any role in the Postwar Gaza nor in the political horizon which is intended to open when the bombs stop. It’s also what you want Israel, which has promised to “destroy” to the islamist militia. Some plans are very difficult to fit with the complicated Palestinian reality.
It’s impossible to know what will remain of Hamas when hostilities definitively cease, a movement that has ruled Gaza without opposition since 2007, when it neutralized the frustrated blow of its rivals Fatah to snatch away the power obtained a year earlier at the polls, the first elections in which he attended. There is no reliable data on how many militiamen have been eliminated, but according to Israeli security sources cited by ‘The Guardian’, the figure would not exceed 2,000 troops of the nearly 30,000 that Hamas had before its brutal terrorist attack on southern Israel, which left nearly 1,200 dead and launched this latest war last October 7.
Those casualties include some of their commandersparticularly in northern Gaza, but they have neither lost control of the Strip nor any of its political and military leaders, such as Yahya Sinwar, Mohamed Deif either Marwan Issa. If we add to all this that Hamas has a strong popular supportr in West Bank and East Jerusalem –territories where it operates clandestinely– or what is the hegemonic force in the diaspora refugee campsit can be safely stated that it will not disappear, no matter how diminished its military capacity in Gaza may be.
And that is where the problems will begin for Washington and Brusselswho consider Hamas a “terrorist organization” — like Israel and four other countries, all Western except Paraguay — and they want to deny it a space in the post-war future of Gaza and its plans to resolve the conflict in Palestine as a whole. “Who is today? palestinian leader? “It’s Hamas, whether you like it or not,” the secular and moderate leader said a few days ago. Sari Nusseibeh, who was president of Al Quds University. “At this time Hamas is perceived as the main representative of the Palestinian interests because no one else is defending them. “The ANP does not enter the minds of the people,” added Nussibeh.
More popular than the Palestinian Authority
For the majority of Palestinians, Hamas is today the only organization that actively resists the israeli military occupationin addition to a Islamist political project. Before the war his popularity was in free fall, but he still surpassed the ANP in Ramallah. According to a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), if elections had been held a month before the fateful October 7, the president Mahmoud Abbas would have obtained 37% of the votes compared to 58% of Ismail Haniyehthe leader of Hamas.
Since then the pendulum has swung even further in favor of the Islamists. Not only because they have managed to break the immobility and redirect international attention towards a conflict that had been forgotten, but because the Palestinians have stopped believing in the ANP and its president. A Mahmoud Abbas who has fulfilled 88 years old. Its administration is perceived as corrupt, authoritarian and inefficient. But his greatest sin is having become, in the eyes of the citizens, a subcontracts the Israeli occupationa bond that he has not even tried to break since the devastation of Gaza began.
Brussels’ bet has lost legitimacy
This has made 66% of Palestinians in the West Bank see the ANP as an obstacle and 85% want Abbas to resign, according to the latest PSR survey, carried out after the start of the race. That is why Brussels’ insistence on betting on a horse without bellowseven though he is the main standard bearer of a peaceful solution to the conflict who has not had an interlocutor (or correspondence) in Israel for at least a decade. “I do not see another actor more politically legitimized to take control of Gaza and for terrorism to be eradicated,” he said this week. Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy, during the Summit of the Union for the Mediterranean, held in Barcelona. Borrell recognized that the ANP is not perfectbut he also stressed that, under the current circumstances, there is no time to hold elections.
Washington is also betting on the ANP to take charge of Gaza, although in its case it speaks of “a revitalized ANP”, a concept that has not been revealed. The idea does not even convince the interested parties themselves, who are aware that it would be suicide unless the transfer of power occurs in the middle of a serious, credible and advanced political process with Israel, a scenario that does not exist today. “For the Palestinian Authority to return to Gaza to take charge of its affairs without a political solution for the West Bank would be like back on the back of a tank or an Israeli F-16,” the Palestinian prime minister said, Mohammed Shtayyeh (ANP).
Nor does Netanyahu accept the idea of Europeans and Americans, since it would serve to leave the occupied territories under a sole leadershipsomething he has actively worked against for years, the first step so that there can be a Palestinian state, rejected outright by his Government. His confessed plan is for Israel to take over “all security in Gaza” for an indefinite period, he said in early November.
Integration of Hamas into the PLO
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Palestinian civil society points out at least two possible solutions to the mess. The holding electionswhich would be the first in almost two decades, or that Hamas integrates into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) together with Al Fatah and the rest of the factions to create a unified leadership in which everyone fits. An option that has been tried several times without success, the last one at the beginning of 2021, when the pressure from Israel and the US ended up leaving the agreement reached between the two main Palestinian factions a dead letter.
The rest will be difficult to work because Hamas is not going away and, as it has demonstrated at various times in the last 30 years, it is very capable of dynamiting solutions in which it does not believe or from which it has been excluded. All he needs is an explosive belt and one of the ‘martyrs’ who will line up to avenge their families in Gaza, East Jerusalem or the West Bank. That is why this week, while Borrell insisted on the ANP as the only possible helmsman for the post-apocalyptic Gaza that he is leaving Israel, his Jordanian colleague looked the other way. “It is the Palestinians who have to decide who governs them,” the Jordanian foreign minister said as soon as he regained his voice. Ayman Safadi.