Author: Martin Kramer

Did Hamas really win in Gaza?

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer posted this comment in the thread “Did Hamas Really Win in Gaza?” at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH).

One way to approach this question is to ask whether Hamas has achieved the objectives for which it escalated the crisis, by its refusal to extend the cease-fire. Musa Abu Marzuq, number two in the Damascus office, explained the primary Hamas objective in a very straightforward way: “The tahdiyeh had become ‘a ceasefire [in exchange for another] ceasefire,’ with no connection either to the crossings and [the goods] transported through them, or to the siege. Terminating it was [thus] a logical move.” So Hamas gambled, escalated, and now finds itself, once again, in a “cease-fire for a cease-fire.” Israel’s primary objective was to compel a cease-fire by means of deterrence alone, without opening the crossings, thus serving its long-term strategy of containing and undercutting Hamas. This it has achieved, so far.

When Israel launched its operation, Hamas announced a secondary objective: to inflict significant military casualties on the Israelis. For this purpose, it had built up a network of fortifications supposedly on the Lebanon model, which it promised to turn into a “graveyard” for Israeli forces. The military wing announced that “the Zionist enemy will see surprises and will regret carrying out such an operation and will pay a heavy price. Our militants are waiting with patience to confront the soldiers face to face.” This too never happened. The Hamas line quickly folded, its “fighters” shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population. That Hamas failed to fight did surprise many Israeli soldiers, who had expected more. But there was no battle anywhere, and Israel suffered only 10 military fatalities, half of them from friendly fire. Hamas has taken to claiming that Israel has hidden its military casualties, and has thrown out various numbers—a rather precise measure of what it had hoped and failed to achieve.

There is something perverse in the notion that Hamas “won” by merely surviving. Robert Malley has said that “for Hamas, it was about showing that they could stay in place without giving way, and from this point of view it has achieved its main objective.” This was not its “main objective” by any stretch of the imagination. Rashid Khalidi has written that “like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all [Hamas] has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing.” But Hamas had a specific objective—lifting the “siege”—which was altogether different from the objective of Hezbollah. This objective Hamas manifestly failed to achieve. It also failed to achieve the secondary objective it shared with Hezbollah: inflicting Israeli military casualties. It defies logic to declare the mere survival of Hamas to be a triumph, given that Hamas openly declared a much larger objective, and Israel never made the military destruction of Hamas an objective.

War is only the pursuit of politics by other means, and anything could happen going forward. Israel could forfeit its war gains by inept diplomacy—something for which there is ample Israeli precedent. Hamas could parley its setback into a diplomatic gain—something for which there is ample Arab precedent. But I think there is little doubt that at the end of the war, Israel had achieved many of its stated objectives, and Hamas had not.

A final point, on the comparison of Hamas to Hezbollah. It is always a mistake to lump these two movements together. Hezbollah’s “Islamic Resistance” deserves the name. For years, it confronted Israel militarily in southern Lebanon, and fought battles of maneuver and assaulted Israel’s fortified lines. Its cadres received serious Iranian training, and while they didn’t win a straight fight with the IDF in 2006, they were battle-hardened, fought hard, and inflicted casualties. The “resistance” of Hamas has always been a fiction. Hamas’s so-called “military wing” developed in circumstances of occupation, and it specialized exclusively in the suicide belt and the Qassam rocket, both terrorist weapons which it directed almost exclusively at civilians. The videos of masked Hamas “fighters” in elaborate jihad-chic costumes, brandishing guns and jumping through hoops of fire, were cheap posturing. Hamas doesn’t have a cadre of battle-hardened fighters; one Israeli soldier aptly described those who did pop up in Gaza as “villagers with guns.”

If the “siege” of Gaza is significantly eased or lifted (which I still think is unlikely), it won’t be because Palestinian “resistance” forced Israel’s hand. It will be because Palestinian suffering has weighed on the conscience of others. That’s a very old story, and there’s nothing new or “heroic” about it. Those who’ve promised to liberate Jerusalem and Palestine by arms are (again) begging the world for sacks of flour.

The return of George Mitchell

On By Martin Kramer

As early as today, according to reliable reports, President Obama will appoint former Senator George Mitchell as his special Middle East envoy. Mitchell, it will be recalled, led a commission to investigate the causes of Israeli-Palestinian violence back in 2001. (Details and some takes here.)

I had the chance to spend some time with Mitchell last month, when he and I attended a conference at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. I don’t think he’d spent much time in the region since his earlier mission, and he was clearly collecting information on all that had happened in the interim. During a twenty-minute taxi ride, he peppered me with questions about Hamas and Gaza—the new twist that will make his mission that much more difficult. I hope I set him straight.

Click here to read a transcript of his remarks at the conference (mine are there too). It’s what Mitchell didn’t say that left the greatest impression on me. Mitchell had been U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland, a task he later passed on to Richard Haass, who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations. That effort was crowned with success, and both Mitchell and Haass have had frequent recourse to the Northern Ireland analogy in relation to Israel and the Palestinians. It’s a problematic one, but at least Mitchell uses it in a restrained way. When he makes it, he simply means to say that even difficult conflicts can be resolved. In contrast, Haass stretches it way too far, and once argued that “U.S. officials ought to sit down with Hamas officials, much as they have with the leaders of Sinn Féin, some of whom also led the Irish Republican Army.” Some press reports had named Haass as a candidate for the envoy slot, and I wrote against the idea because it would have been read as a nod to Hamas.

I have a small confession: I did a lot to undermine Mitchell’s last major excursion into Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution. No, it wasn’t in 2001, it was exactly four years ago in 2005, when Mitchell tried to get up a conference on the subject at Columbia University, where he was a senior fellow at something called the Center for International Conflict Resolution. Columbia was in the middle of a firestorm over the abuse of students by its errant Middle East agitprofs. Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon was scheduled to appear at Mitchell’s conference, which would have been a convenient fig leaf for the university’s embattled administration. So I raised a ruckus right here on this blog. (With my typical understatement, I wrote that Columbia president Lee Bollinger “should have to jump through a hundred more hoops before an Israeli ambassador crosses 116th Street.”) Ayalon, who knew nothing about the problem at Columbia, called me (and others) to discuss it, and in the end he pulled out, for which I praised him highly. Mitchell’s conference collapsed, but I felt sorry for him, since he had gotten caught up in the mess inadvertently. I summed that up in a post entitled “Poor George Mitchell,” which I ended with these words: “Maybe Mitchell should go back to real-life negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians. Prospects look better there than they do on campus.”

Last month, I told Mitchell in jest that he should try his hand at Mideast mediation once again, and he brushed off the suggestion. Little did I know. I welcome George Mitchell back, and wish him better luck this time.

Pointer: I’m quoted today in this New York Times article by Isabel Kershner, “Few Israelis Near Gaza Feel War Achieved Much.”

Civilians should be protected, unless…

On By Martin Kramer

In going back over earlier Hamas materials to which I’ve linked in years past, I rediscovered this August 2001 exchange between an interviewer and the late Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (whose image is the background to this photo of present Hamas “prime minister” Ismail Haniyeh). In the interview, Yassin offered a rather unique interpretation of the Geneva Convention. It seems relevant to the present discussion about targeting and avoiding civilian casualties, and faithfully reflects the Hamas view to this day. The relevant segment:

Question: What is the consequence of the deaths of Sheikh Jamal Mansur and Sheikh Jamal Selim (the two top Hamas leaders killed in Nablus) for your organization?

Yassin: Their deaths push us towards more resistance and increase our determination. The way the two sheikhs were killed was cowardly. They were sitting in a media office, they were not in a military base or engaged in a military operation. Military people know they risk dying in battle, but civilians should be protected by the Geneva Convention.

Question: How about Israeli civilians, shouldn’t they be kept out of the conflict as well?

Yassin: The Geneva convention protects civilians in occupied territories, not civilians who are in fact occupiers.

Question: Wasn’t it cowardly to attack young people at a Tel Aviv disco (a terror attack for which Hamas has claimed responsibility)?

Yassin: They’re the ones who are criminals. They took my house and my country. The soldier who attacks us, the pilot who shells us, where do they live? All of Israel, Tel Aviv included, is occupied Palestine. So we’re not actually targeting civilians—that would go against Islam. The crime of occupation is not more legitimate in Tel Aviv [than it is in the West Bank, seized by Israel in 1967] because it is older. If Israel stole my house in Ashkelon in 1948, does it mean it’s OK to have made me homeless? Up to this day Jews are running after Nazis and suing countries although their losses happened a long time ago.

So civilians who are occupiers are not protected, and Tel Aviv is occupied Palestinian territory. Remember this the next time you hear someone say that Hamas deserves sympathy as a movement of “resistance” against “occupation.” Accurate translation: jihad to drive the Jews from “Palestine.”

By the way, in that same interview, Yassin was asked if he was afraid Israel would try to kill him. His answer: “Please, they are welcome.” A couple of years later, they took him up on that.