What Israel thinks about Hamas and the status of the Palestinian crisis in the past, and what Israel might say in the next few years
Israel’s failure to provide plans for postwar Gaza shows the degree of idiocy in Israeli thinking. The reality of what Hamas is is ignored by the Israeli leadership. Hamas is an armed group that uses terrorism and has won elections and has been governing Gaza for more than 15 years. Resistance is part of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, that’s why it embodies an idea. Hamas is not a nihilistic group and is embedded in the fabric of Palestinian society. If you look closely at it, its popularity increases not with a need for blood, but with the fact that other paths for achieving liberation are closed to Palestinians.
In the north, Hezbollah could cause a full-blown conflict in Lebanon and Israel, if it continued to fire on Israel. The increased military deployment in the region is designed to be preventive, but it can also be seen as a way for the U.S. to bring about a war with Israel. The wider regional conflagration is already here. The question is how bad it will get.
For Hamas, that displacement, along with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Mideast war, were great historical wrongs that had to be righted by force of arms. Hamas viewed peace talks with Israel as a capitulation to Israel in their control overoccupied Palestinian land, and therefore they dismissed them as betrayal.
Throughout the current crisis, Qatar has acted as a secret broker between Israel, Hamas and the United States in order to gain the release of prisoners in Gaza. The release of all women, children, older adults and the sick in exchange for a five day cessation of hostilities was close to being finalized last month according to current and former officials from three regional capitals. Israel launched its ground incursion to stop that deal.
Moreover, the alternative offered by the Palestinian Authority, sustained via security cooperation with Israel, has been discredited in the eyes of most Palestinians by the entrenchment and intensification of Israeli occupation, including a more than fourfold increase in illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank since the Oslo process began.
The violence would not be solved in the short term, even if Mr. Blinken gave a few details about how such an arrangement might be implemented. But restoring the Palestinian Authority — which administers parts of the West Bank — to power in Gaza would not be easy even if Israel managed to end Hamas’s rule. Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is deeply unpopular. Many Palestinians view him as corrupt and say his attempts to win independence through peace talks have failed.
The road back from the hell of a zero-sum “us or them” begins with the humanizing of the other. Maybe it is a road that leads us back to two states. Or maybe the partition paradigm is part of the problem, encouraging separation and the idea that walls must exist between Palestinians and Israelis. There are no easy solutions. But if our nightmares emerged in failing to anticipate and prevent the horrors of Oct. 7 and every day since, then perhaps it is time to unleash our political imagination in laying the groundwork for a future of life and hope.
Some factions had signed accords with Israel, meant to pave the way for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority, envisioned as a Palestinian government in waiting, had limited authority over parts of the West Bank and remained officially committed to negotiating an end to the conflict.
Hamas, meanwhile, effectively sought to undo history, starting with 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what would become Israel during the war surrounding the foundation of the Jewish state.
Hamas, too, bolstered the idea that it was prioritizing governing over battle. Twice, the group refrained from joining clashes with Israel started by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militia in Gaza. According to diplomats involved in the discussions, Hamas was attempting to increase aid to Gaza and the number of laborers working in Israel.
When Mr. Sinwar became head of Hamas in Gaza, he was interested in finding a way out of his relationship with Israel. In 2018, he gave a rare interview to an Italian journalist working for an Israeli newspaper and appealed for a cease-fire to ease the suffering in Gaza.
He said he was not saying he wouldn’t fight anymore. “I am saying that I don’t want war anymore. I want to end the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like,” he added. “I want them free.”
The Defense of a Two-State Solution between Israel and the West Bank, as Previewed by the Secretary of State and the White House
Hamas also issued a political program in 2017 that allowed for the possibility of a two-state solution, while still not recognizing Israel’s right to exist.
“The Israelis were only concerned with one thing: How do I get rid of the Palestinian cause?” Mr. Hamdan spoke. “They were heading in that direction and not even thinking about the Palestinians. All of that could happen if the Palestinians didn’t resist.
Still, in 2021, Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council thought that Hamas wanted to avoid another war, according to people familiar with the assessments.
The Israeli security establishment believed its complex border defenses to shoot down rockets and stop Hamas from entering was enough to keep Hamas contained.
By Oct. 7, Hamas was estimated to have 20,000 to 40,000 fighters, with about 15,000 rockets, mainly manufactured in Gaza with components most likely smuggled in through Egypt, according to American and other Western analysts. They said that the group had portable air-defense systems as well.
Mr. Sinwar restored ties to Iran, which had been strained in 2012 when Hamas closed its office in Syria, a close ally of Iran.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Wednesday that Gaza should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority once the war is over, offering a strong signal about what the United States sees as its preferred endgame in the fight between Israel and Hamas.
Veterans of the often contentious diplomacy between the leaders of Israel and the United States said the willingness of the president and the secretary of state to be critical of Israel in public is a response to that dissatisfaction with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
The remarks by Mr. Blinken on Wednesday reflect a deep anxiety on the part of Mr. Biden and his aides inside the White House as the conflict enters its second month. The president has a lot of work to do to define an alternative to war in the Middle East, since the rush to defend an ally has become a much more complicated diplomatic challenge.
John F. Kirby is a spokesman for the National Security Council. “And I don’t know that it would be reasonable for us to think that we could, at this particular point, one month into the conflict. It has to be something different from what it was under Hamas.
In the days after Hamas invaded Israel, Vice President Biden embraced Israel’s right to retaliate, an stance that White House officials still repeat frequently.
In his comments on Wednesday, Mr. Blinken made no reference to the presence of Israeli forces remaining inside Gaza, home to about 2 million Palestinians.