By Azzam Tamimi
December 12, 2007 9:00 AM
Guardian
Daily deadly attacks on Gaza, the resumption of incursions into West Bank towns and villages and the plan to build three hundred housing units in East Jerusalem is hardly what the Arabs who attended Annapolis expected to be its immediate results. The Israeli measures must have surprised even Mahmud Abbas and his team mates who, at Annapolis, were all smiles.
Anyone watching TV footage of the Annapolis receptions could not miss the opportunity to see members of the Palestinian team warmly hugging members of the Israeli team, while other Arab delegates watched from a distance. The smiles on the faces reflected a congratulatory mood and expressed optimism that some unprecedented breakthrough was in the pipeline.
The reality is that Annapolis has primarily been about two things; first, maintaining the sanctions against the Gaza Strip and increasing the pressure on Hamas; and second, re-launching the Road Map, which had long been dead and buried.
Upon learning of the success of Hamas in the January 2006 elections, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert formed two committees and commissioned them to deliberate the matter and submit their recommendations to him. He wanted them to advise him how best to deal with this "nightmarish" development. One of the committees, headed by Major General (ret.) Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli national security council and national security advisor to the Prime Minister, concluded that a new reality had emerged and that it would be in the best interests of Israel to reach an understanding of some sort with Hamas, whom the election proved was speaking for the majority of the Palestinians in the territories. Interestingly, General Eiland, together with an increasingly number of Israeli politicians including Amir Peretz, has been urging Israel to negotiate with Hamas.
The other committee concluded that the only option Olmert had was to empower Abbas so as to bring Hamas down. Olmert opted for the second set of recommendations and came up with his three conditions that soon afterwards became the Quartet conditions, shutting the door on Hamas and rallying the international community with the support of his US backers to boycott the movement and punish the Palestinians for having voted for it.
Few lessons seem to have been learned by those who devised the policy of sanctions. The US and Israel assume that the sanctions are working and that Hamas is losing support. Policy makers in Washington are clearly guided, or misguided, by wishful thinking and misinformation.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Hamas's popularity has dwindled. To the contrary, the people of Gaza blame the crisis more on Abbas than on Hamas. The economy is indeed in bad shape in Gaza. But the strip is safer than ever before. Few people blame Hamas for shortages of food, medicine or fuel but most people are grateful for security, something which most Gazans missed when Abbas's men were in charge. The economic situation is not as bad in the West Bank. Yet, most of its inhabitants feel insecure. Scores of Palestinians are arrested every day by Israel or the PNA while thugs acting with impunity continue to have a free hand in harassing people and abusing them.
The Ramallah government is seen by many Fatah loyalists as a bunch of outsiders. An increasing number of Fatah leaders have recently been more vocal in calling for its replacement.
A statement released in Ramallah by Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has gone as far as describing Fayyad's administration as a puppet government of Israel and the US.A recent debacle by the PNA representative at the UN, who is not a Fatah member, urging the General Assembly to adopt a resolution declaring Hamas "an outlawed militia" sent many Fatah supporters wondering who the man was speaking for.
There can be nothing more tarnishing to Fatah's image than the project of reform the movement is said to undertake under the supervision of Dennis Ross who is commissioned and funded by the US Congress and who has been visiting the West Bank frequently for this purpose. One wonders whether the Americans and the Israelis are at all aware that post-Annapolis Abbas is, as a result, a much weaker man. Palestinians and Arabs alike feel the man wittingly or otherwise deceived them by pinning high hopes on Annapolis.
Evidently, the Egyptians and the Saudis dealt him a painful blow when they agreed with the Hamas leadership to allow Gaza's pilgrims to travel to Mecca via the Rafah crossing, which was closed in the aftermath of Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June.
His prime minister, Salam Fayyad, had already made arrangements to transport the pilgrims via Israel to the West Bank and then via Jordan to Saudi Arabia in a bid to improve prove that he was in charge and that Hamas was irrelevant. His plot did not work.
Deluded by wishful thinking, the Israelis and the Americans have been wagering on the losing horse. There is only one way out of the current predicament and that is to abandon the policy of turning the PNA into another Lahad entity and seek an understanding with Hamas. The movement should be talked to without preconditions.
A number of issues need to be immediately addressed.
There is first the problem of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Exchanging Shalit for Palestinian prisoners, and there are nearly 12,000 of them in Israel's captivity, should set the scene for further undertakings.
Secondly, the sanctions and the regime of collective punishments should come to an end. This may be negotiated as part of a tahdi'ah, a period of calming, during which the firing of rockets from Gaza is stopped and so is the hunting of Palestinian activists in the West Bank.
A series of measures should enable the two sides, in due course, to negotiate a long-term cease-fire that will end up with a total disengagement along the pre-June 1967 war armistice lines.
Hamas is here to stay and those interested in resolving the conflict have no option but to knock on its door.
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