24/10/2007
The rise of Hamas and its dominant political position amongst Palestinian factions presents a unique challenge to Israel and the international community. Understanding this challenge requires careful attention to the characteristics of Hamas. In all diplomacy and intelligence, the risk exists of mirror-imaging, assuming that others will operate according to logic as we understand it.
In this case, parallels with the process towards peace in Northern Ireland are prevalent, but obscure more than they reveal. The parallel rests on a number of assumptions that do not stand up to scrutiny when we examine the history of both conflicts.
Understandably, the search for historical parallels to recent events has led various observers to promote an interpretation of the emerging situation in the Middle East that assimilates Hamas to the pattern of Irish Republican terrorism in Northern Ireland and the end to violence in that conflict. The central contention is that the attainment and promise of power moderated the views and actions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and that a similar development can reasonably be expected to occur within Hamas notwithstanding short-term setbacks.
The history of how Hamas has used office following its success in the Palestinian elections of January 2006 goes a long way to falsify the hypothesis, but the parallel is false in several basic respects that precede the recent flow of events. First, the parallel overlooks fundamental differences between the nature and aims of Hamas and the IRA. Second, it relies on historically incorrect accounts of the two conflicts. Finally, it fails to acknowledge a number of considerations specific to Hamas and the state of relations between Israel and the Palestinians that make prospects for a similar process to that seen in Northern Ireland very unlikely. Most tellingly though, has been the different courses followed once power was initially attained. Whereas the IRA has largely though not entirely honoured its ceasefire announced in 1997, Hamas has continued to use violence as a strategic instrument from its position of electoral power. That violence has been directed both within the Palestinian administration and against Israel. Where the IRA committed to a process that marginalised and then render obsolete its military arm, Hamas continues to work within a strategic framework in which escalation is a key element, making no organizational distinction between its political and military functions.
Using the disarming of the IRA to argue that it is now undemocratic to refuse to negotiate with Hamas is particularly problematic for these reasons. The lesson of the Northern Ireland conflict is not that electoral success and political participation moderate terror groups, but that robust insistence on democratic norms is a prerequisite to introducing terror groups into democratic dialogue. Since its victory in the January 2006 elections, Hamas has not simply failed to act in a way comparable to the course adopted by the IRA during the Northern Ireland peace process, but in all key respects has broken with that template.
The parallel between Hamas and the IRA has shaped the thinking both of opinion leaders and policy makers. Leading voices have sought to interpret Hamas's successful participation in elections as part of an overall move towards democratic engagement along the lines of other groups, particularly, of course, the IRA. The tendency to promote this analogy has been particularly evident since the success of Hamas in the mid-2005 municipal elections in the Palestinian areas and has continued to be made through the subsequent two years in which Hamas attained and then consolidated its control of Palestinian politics.
As the Times wrote at the time of the elections, "The very fact that Hamas is participating in elections is a bonus for Mr. Abbas's strategy to wean the gunmen off violence by co-opting them into the political process." This argument also hinted at the belief that Hamas's evolution was part of a natural process with precedents elsewhere. As Zvi Bar'el of Israeli daily Haaretz argued:
"Hamas is going through a process that most of the religious movements in the region are now going through. It's a process in which political achievements are important in and of themselves, even if they have an ideological price. ... The need to read the popularity map politically is something new for Hamas, and that might be the greatest achievement of all in these elections."
Following the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006, the above argument was widely interpreted as being borne out by events on the ground. Daniel Finkelstein, in the Times, contended that "In Ireland, the IRA began to shift only with the gradual realisation of Gerry Adams that his terror campaign would lose and that the fruits of political involvement would be withheld until he had decided to abandon the bullet for the ballot. And this may be the silver lining behind Hamas's victory."
The parallels extended, usually with some qualifications, to suggestions that direct lessons can be drawn from events in Northern Ireland for those managing policy towards Hamas. Mark Davenport, the BBC's Northern Ireland political editor, for example, wrote for the BBC that "[T]he journey of Hamas may pose some similar challenges to that thrown up by the journey of Sinn Fein."
Even after the summer war of 2006, the armed conflict between Hamas and Fatah, and continuing violence from Hamas in power, the parallel still endures.
In an article for the Guardian in January 2007 titled 'The Transformation of the IRA shows why Israel should talk to Hamas', Jonathan Freedland made the analogy explicit.
Anthony Bulabo of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney told Australia's The Age in August 2007 that 'If you look at the movements like the IRA, and Hamas and Hezbollah and other classical movements that started as terrorist movements or have used terrorism as a tactic, there has generally been an evolution and it's that evolution and maturation'.
Within the policymaking community, this analogy with the IRA has led many to believe in the need to bring Hamas into the negotiating process. This was true even before the January election. Indeed, in June 2005, the British Foreign Office acknowledged that it was considering engaging openly with the group, despite the fact that it was on the EU's terror blacklist. Two months later, the Telegraph reported on possible MI6 contacts with Hamas on the grounds that "MI6 has a long history of entering into negotiations with outlawed terror groups, notably with the IRA in the 1980s. That dialogue ultimately resulted in Sinn Fein's leaders giving up the armed struggle for political negotiation".
Such links have been promoted most publicly by Alistair Crooke, a one-time senior MI6 officer, who between 1997 and 2003 was EU envoy to the Palestinian Authority and liaised with Islamist groups within this framework. Interestingly, Lord Alderdice, the former leader of the tiny Alliance Party, who promoted compromise in Northern Ireland, has cooperated with Crooke on this matter through the private institute Conflicts Forum, an organisation whose representatives, including Crooke and Alderdice, travelled to Beirut to meet Hamas leaders before the 2006 election. It was reported by BBC Middle East Monitoring in December 2006 that Crooke's involvement has even extended to assisting Hamas in drafting certain public statements in the hope of moderating their political stance.
Elsewhere, the comparative success of the Northern Ireland peace process has increased its attractiveness as a template for policy-makers despite concerns about its universal applicability. Principals from that process recently led a conference in Helsinki designed to produce a basic agreement between warring factions in Iraq. The Irish government is understood to be in the process of creating a specialist unit within the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs whose purpose will be to mediate between parties involved in conflicts around the world, drawing directly on the Irish government's own experience in the Northern Ireland peace process. It is expected that the Middle East Peace Process will be a primary focus of the unit's attention.
Despite such efforts and the widely held hope that the Northern Ireland peace process provides a model for the Israeli government, the reality is that the underlying rationale assumes a parallel between Hamas and the IRA that overlooks profound differences in the aims, character and context of each group.
The argument that the IRA and Hamas are similarly motivated by religious considerations is gravely flawed. While the IRA claimed to represent the Catholics of Northern Ireland, the group did not seek the establishment of a fundamentalist Catholic state. Neither did the IRA seek or receive theological support from the Catholic Church. On the contrary, throughout the IRA's campaign, Catholic leaders were unwavering in their denunciation of violence as a political strategy. On his visit to Ireland in 1979, the late Pope John Paul II spoke to a crowd of three hundred thousand near the border with Northern Ireland, pleading, "On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and return to the ways of peace."
Moreover, there existed within the IRA a strong anti-clerical tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century. During the conflict, the IRA's attitude hardened against the Catholic Church, particularly following the failure of Catholic mediators to secure a compromise from the British government during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s.
Such was the depth of ill-feeling that when secret talks began between IRA leader Gerry Adams and the Redemptorist priest Father Alec Reid, they were kept secret even from Adams' colleagues on the IRA's supreme governing body, the Army Council. It is noteworthy that even these tentative exploratory talks with the IRA required sanction from the Vatican and were the source of considerable controversy at high levels within the Catholic Church.
The contrast in the case of Hamas could hardly be more pronounced. Hamas finds inspiration and justification for its existence, actions and aims in a particularly militant strain of Islam. Hamas was founded in 1988 as an explicitly Islamist group, arising out of the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself an organisation wedded to a militant fundamentalist variety of Islam. Since 1967, the Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the Gaza Strip and is credited with disseminating much of the thought that has inspired Islamist terrorism, particularly through the Egyptian philosopher of jihad Said Qutb, whose works offer the major theoretical foundation for jihadists throughout the Arab world, including Al Qaeda.
The Hamas Charter 1, still operative, quotes extensively from the Koran and views the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians through an explicitly theological prism. As Article One affirms, "the movement's programme is Islam." In the lead-up to the Palestinian elections, the Hamas leadership declared that under their rule, " In the Islamist Palestinian state, every citizen will be required to act in accordance with the codes of Islamic religious law." In keeping with its Islamic self-image, Hamas views itself as a universal movement taking centre stage in a global war on behalf of all Muslims around the world and not simply to advance the position of Palestinian nationalism, which salafists such as the Muslim Brotherhood condemn as polytheism and idolatry. 2 Article Seven of the Charter states that Hamas is "well-equipped for [its universal mission] because of the clarity of its ideology, the nobility of its aim and the loftiness of its objectives."
Additionally, the Islam of Hamas is particularly aggressive. Whereas the IRA distinguished, at least rhetorically, between the British state and the Protestant population of Ulster, strategically targeting the former and tactically targeting the latter, Hamas makes little distinction between Israel and the Jewish people. Theological imperatives account for the Charter's explicit commitment to target Jews. Article Seven concludes:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."
Various branches of the Republican movement did participate in sectarian-inspired violence throughout the Troubles. But despite involvement in a number of sectarian murders, the organisation denied sectarianism. Indeed, it would have been unthinkable for the organisation to declare war on adherents of Protestantism across the world, no matter where they lived, simply on the basis of their religion.
Violence has been used differently by Hamas and the IRA. IRA targets were usually, though not always, selected by reference to a theory of 'legitimate targets' that singled out members of the British government and the security services. The IRA's strategic aim was to undermine Britain's will to remain in Northern Ireland and to weaken their practical ability to exert control over the territory. Due to the adverse publicity occasioned by atrocities such as the bombing of Remembrance Day commemorations at Enniskillen in 1987, which led to widespread revulsion among Irish nationalists, the IRA typically sought to minimise loss of life through telephone warnings when bombs were placed. Throughout the later stages of the conflict, the IRA's leadership was mindful of the effect of their attacks on support within their community, and this consideration imposed parameters on the IRA's use of force as it evolved from no warning bomb attacks on crowded pubs killing dozens in Britain in the seventies to targeting the infrastructure of the City of London and using bomb warnings to interrupt the highlight of the horse-racing calendar, the Grand National.
Hamas does not differentiate between security personnel and civilians and revels in civilian casualties. This is explained by Hamas's theological commitment to target Jews. Hamas does not take any measures to minimise casualties. On the contrary, suicide bombers have chosen their targets - buses and cafes, for example - with a view to maximising the loss of life their attacks will cause. No warnings are given. Importantly, the deaths of large numbers of people in Hamas attacks do not appear to have weakened support for the group but rather have appeared to add to its ever-growing popularity, as shown by Mia Bloom of Cincinnati University in her book - Dying to Kill. 3 Whereas the IRA was required to strategically limit the level of its violence, a structural element of Hamas's increasing support is approval of the group's success as the most effective among the terrorist groups in inflicting high-casualty suicide attacks against Israeli targets.
This has been born out since the January 2006 elections in a dramatic manner. Whereas the IRA ceased most operations after attaining office, while maintaining for a time intelligence gathering and fundraising activities, its entry into democratic politics and its deepening commitment to that process was matched by a marked decrease in its use of violence. The ceasefire of July 1997 preceded, importantly, the formal talks that led to the pivotal Belfast Agreement the next year and it was largely upheld from that point on. Though some killings did continue, there was almost no repeat of the bombing attacks and conflict with security forces that had been its hallmark through earlier decades and residual violence formed no significant part of its strategic decision-making.
The contrast with the course Hamas has elected to follow since assuming power could hardly be more pronounced. Five months after its electoral victory, Hamas abducted Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, an act of war that seriously degraded relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and that was also a contributing factor to the outbreak of conflict later that summer. Such an act would have been almost unthinkable from the IRA after power-sharing was agreed, as would such provocative acts of violence have been during the preceding talks. It was only after the strategy of escalation had been abandoned in favour of de-escalation and a commitment to basic democratic principles as laid down by mediator Senator George Mitchell that political progress proved possible.
By was of further illustration of the contrary course on which Hamas is embarked, less than three weeks after reaching an agreement with Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas on September 11th 2006 to share power, Hamas was involved in the most large-scale internal violence between Palestinians in a decade, an important event that foreshadowed later, worse violence. Where the IRA was able over a long period of time to join a broad consensus on the shape of the political settlement that would come to be enshrined in the Belfast Agreement, seeking to coordinate the aims of constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, the Irish government, and Sinn Fein itself, Hamas has considered Fatah not as a partner in an overarching peace process but as an internal enemy.
This was made clear in February 2007 when Hamas launched a violent campaign against Fatah, primarily in the Gaza strip, which delivered de facto control of that territory to Hamas and which ended lingering efforts towards agreeing a unity government. Both the decision to attempt to monopolise power and the ruthless use of violence that effected that monopolisation of power in Gaza depart dramatically from the decisions made by the IRA, which sought a common front within its community as much as a decade before eventual political agreement and political office, as well as generally foreswearing violence once within democratic politics.
The argument that the experience in Northern Ireland has something to offer conflict resolution efforts between Israel and the Palestinians is an argument about the origins of compromise. Depictions of a parallel between Hamas and the IRA misrepresent both the origins of the IRA's willingness to compromise and the positions Hamas has taken in recent years. Importantly, the argument that democracy moderated the IRA's behaviour and contributed to peace needs to be debunked.
A careful consideration of the Northern Ireland peace process shows that the IRA's renunciation of the 'long war' was only possible in light of a number of factors that are not shared in the case of Hamas. None of these came about because of the moderating effect of holding office but because of willingness within the IRA to revise ideological obstacles and to accept, however grudgingly, the need for a realistic agreement to end the conflict.
First, the IRA maintained a division between its military wing and its political wing, Sinn Fein. Despite much common membership and the necessarily close links between the IRA and its political arm, the distinction between military and political organisations made possible the emergence of a group of Sinn Fein leaders who were less visibly associated with terror and who came to prominence as political rather than military figures. Hamas makes little explicit distinction between its military and other wings. That is why the EU agreed to proscribe Hamas itself in 2003, one year after it had outlawed Izzedin al-Kassam, ostensibly the group's 'military' wing. Current plans to create a Palestinian army are drawing Hamas in the opposite direction to that travelled by the IRA.
Second, the IRA faced considerable pressure from its own community to renounce violence. The IRA leadership is known to have been constrained by the condemnation of the Irish government, most Irish nationalists, the Church and the Irish-American leadership.
Hamas faces no such internal constraint on its use of violence. On the contrary, the support for Hamas is in large part attributable to its willingness to attack Israelis. At the time of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the Northern West bank in August 2005, for example, the Hamas website proudly boasted that it had killed more Israelis in Gaza than any other group. Extremist governments throughout the Middle East, including Iran and Syria, provide support to the group. Influential Islamic scholars, such as the Al Jazeera preacher and senior Muslim Brother Yusuf Al Qaradawi justify the murder of Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike by Hamas's human bombs, overturning the traditional stern Islamic injunctions against suicide.
Third, there existed a basic consensus among Northern Irish nationalists as to their vision for constitutional talks on the future status of the territory. This mainstream provided an opportunity for Sinn Fein and the IRA to increase their influence by joining a unity front of nationalist opinion. No such consensus exists amongst the Palestinians. The secular nationalists of the PLO and the Islamists have long fought each other. Palestinian civil society has broken down since 2000 and the proliferation of militias and factions within Fatah, followed by open violence in 2007, render it effectively impossible for the foreseeable future that a Palestinian consensus on a two-state solution or a ceasefire can be agreed, either in principle or in practice.
Fourth, the Republican tradition in which the IRA operated was sufficiently malleable to allow the leadership to revise ideology and make possible talks to end a long war. Through the 1980s and 1990s, several shifts in Republican dogma were initiated by the IRA leadership. As early as 1986, Gerry Adams was criticising contemporary Republicanism for insufficiently emphasising tolerance of Ireland's other political and religious traditions. Soon after, Adams would argue that Republicans had failed to attend realistically to how a post-conflict state in Northern Ireland might be organised. In Sinn Fein strategy documents published in 1988 and 1992, the group sought to place its politics in the mainstream of left-wing European political thought.
Hamas has made no similar moves towards a reappraisal of its core ideology that enable it to be a partner for peace or to begin a process towards that point. Unlike Sinn Fein and the IRA, Hamas does not recognise the principle of consent. In its charter, Hamas declares its aim not as seeking a negotiated settlement with Israel, but its destruction. Israelis feel inclined to take Hamas at its word. In addition to anti-Israel sentiment, Hamas's charter also includes anti-Semitic elements.
Fifth, Hamas has recently stated that even if it were to undertake superficially similar moves to those adopted by the IRA, these would be taken for self-interested tactical reasons and not because of any moderation in their strategic objectives. Speaking in the run-up to the elections, Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the group's leading figures, repeatedly emphasised that Hamas sees no connection between elections and the peace process, and that any ceasefire along the 1967 lines that Hamas might declare would only be undertaken as part of the continuing campaign against the State of Israel. Zahar specifically sought to dispel hopes that Hamas would turn its attention to democratic means by stating, "We will join the Legislative Council [the Palestinian parliament] with our weapons in our hands."
The theological justification for self-interested is found in the concept of 'hudna', a long-standing provision in Islamic thought that allows for a temporary cease-fire with non-Muslims enemies where it is expedient for the Islamic party to the conflict. This provision explains the purely tactical nature of strategic cessations of violence employed by Hamas since their January 2006 victory, though it should be noted that a formal declaration of hudna has not prevented Hamas from undertaking acts of violence in any case. In the six weeks following the June 2003 hudna, six civilians were killed by Palestinian terrorists and 180 terrorist incidents recorded.
This contrasts with the progress of the IRA towards peace. The IRA did not declare tactical ceasefires in the years preceding talks between its representatives and the governments of Britain and Ireland. The one occasion a supposedly definitive IRA cease-fire did break down was in 1996, but this was a temporary return to violence that was not repeated and to violence that was much more limited in extent than what had gone before, although comprising the deliberately ‘spectacular' bombing of Canary Wharf. Importantly, it was not an indicator that the preceding ceasefire had been a cynical ploy but was the result of a short-term disagreement within the IRA's army council about the state of peace process talks themselves and their chances of success. The breakdown of the first IRA ceasefire that had been declared in1994 did not shift the overall trajectory towards peace that had been set by that declaration and that consolidated in 1998 and afterwards.
Hamas, however, has returned to violence after declaring a self-interested cessation on several occasions. Just as a temporary halt to violence is not indicative of an overall strategic shift in the way that the IRA ceasefire did ultimately prove to be, the apparent steps towards recognition of Israel that Hamas has taken since assuming power in January 2006 have to be understood similarly. Indeed, since that time, Hamas have been open about its true intentions.
At an October 20, 2006 Hamas convention in Khan Yunis, the Hamas Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Al-Zahar stated that:
"Israel is a vile entity that has been planted in our soil, and has no historical, religious or cultural legitimacy. We cannot normalize our relations with this entity. The history of this region has proven [time and again] that occupation is temporary. Thousands of years ago, the Romans occupied this land and [eventually] left. The Persians, Crusaders, and English [also] came and went. The Zionists have come, and they too will leave. [We say] no to recognizing Israel, regardless of the price we may have to pay [for our refusal]."
The head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Khaled Meshaal, was reported by Al-Hayat to have likewise made explicit the group's uncompromising stance, rhetorically asking "Why am I required to [recognize] the legitimacy of an occupying [entity] that is sitting on my land when there are millions of Palestinians who come from the land on which this entity is sitting? It is true that there is an entity called Israel, but I do not wish to recognize it." These any other comments by the Hamas leadership in the period since the 2006 elections make it clear that the group is committed to the destruction of Israel and that any apparent deviations from that policy should be understood as tactical rather than strategic or philosophical shifts.
Finally, it is wrong simply to assume that Hamas will prioritise the interests of the Palestinian people in achieving a negotiated peace and economic development. In the run-up to the 1996 Israeli elections, the Islamists made every effort to undermine the Peres government, which championed the Oslo Accords, by a campaign of brutal suicide bombings, leading to the election of the Likud opposition distrustful of the Oslo process. Since then, the unremitting campaign of terrorism has not only cost Israelis and Palestinians many lives, but also made trade with, or working in, Israel largely impossible for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, further beggaring an already impoverished people.
The most clear-cut illustration of the ongoing Hamas policy of placing its partisan interests over the welfare of the Palestinian people is the power grab that was effected shortly after a unity government was agreed in 2006 and then again in 2007. It should also be remembered that this Hamas-led internal violence occurred through a period of severe economic hardship and at a time when the restoration of minimal standards of self-government was, and indeed is, a top priority for the Palestinians.
As a pre-condition to entering talks towards a constitutional settlement, Sinn Fein and the IRA agreed to the Mitchell principles, committing the movement to exclusively democratic and peaceful means. This was followed in course by an Independent Monitoring Commission that continues to oversee the IRA's ceasefire and to report regularly on breaches such as criminal activity and intelligence gathering. The Irish and British governments, along with the other parties in Northern Ireland, refused to countenance formal negotiations with Sinn Fein without this commitment. The process was advanced by the willingness of constitutional actors to engage with Sinn Fein after a transition to an IRA ceasefire, thus offering incentives for the decision to move towards democratic behaviour. Importantly, the Mitchell principles were not limited to a cessation of violence, but committed the IRA to the full range of internationally recognised democratic norms.
It is important to realise that the fundamentalists of Hamas may be willing to take power through elections, but they are not likely to surrender or share it in the future. Neither the current ceasefire, perhaps influenced by the killing by Israel of most of its experienced terrorist operatives, nor an electoral victory makes Hamas any more democratic. Hamas has not undertaken any of the steps outlined above through which the IRA prepared the ground for formal negotiations and has not accepted any equivalent of the Mitchell principles. Crucially, there is no indication that there is even a constituency within Hamas that would favour doing so. On the contrary, the organisation has been buoyed by its recent success, a success it attributes in large part to its use of violence and its promotion of an undemocratic Sharia-based approach to governance. Allowing Hamas to claim victory over Israel through suicide terrorism and recognising it as a legitimate government is likely to only encourage its brothers in arms throughout the Muslim world, including Al Qaeda, to rely on violence as the best tool for achieving their objectives.
Finally and importantly, while practising terrorism, the IRA never declared that it sought to destroy the British state. As time progressed, the movement came to target property rather than people when attacking mainland Britain. In contrast, Hamas has shown no such distinctions, targeting any Israeli it can reach - whether the elderly or infants, men or women - going about daily life or even during religious ceremonies. Never renouncing the aims of its charter, "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it," Hamas to this day refuses to recognise Israel and deal with it as a negotiating partner: "Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad."
The most telling indicator of the level of commitment Hamas has made to democratic elections is its wish to avoid holding any more. Rather than abiding by the limited mandate afforded to Fatah in January 2006, Hamas has sought to marginalise its rival for Palestinian leadership by force of arms. It is very unlikely, given this strategic choice, that Hamas will consent to elections that revert the balance of power in favour of Hamas or any other Palestinian group.
The lesson of the Northern Ireland conflict is that before formal negotiations towards a settlement can be possible, terrorists must come to accept a realistic analysis of possible end results, tailor their ideology accordingly, embrace democratic norms in principle and in practice, and undertake concrete verifiable measures to build trust. In Northern Ireland, political office has been a reward for successfully embarking on this transition. For Hamas, it has been a reward for flouting the peace process and leading the terror campaign against Israeli civilians over the last decade. If Hamas is ever to become a potential partner for peace, the international community must insist the Hamas undertake the necessary incremental changes as outlined above. Instead, since the elections that handed a dominant position to Hamas at the beginning of 2006, support for the group has steadily grown without any matching commitments to such preconditions. Aid to Palestinians tripled through 2006 despite calls for a boycott of Hamas and its own provocative acts of violence. That strategy has so far failed to deliver any significant moderation of its behaviour, aims, or core values. Rather, it has more deeply entrenched the control Hamas has assumed of Palestinian destiny at the expense of the more moderate Fatah faction. To the extent that this ill-starred course of events has been facilitated and influenced by the supposed parallel between the political trajectories of the IRA and of Hamas, it is further testimony of the danger of seeing commonalities of policymaking relevance between these two, very different, organizations.
“In our 60 years of existence, Israel fought seven wars. Defeat would have ended our existence. However, victory did not…” Read more
An in-depth look at Iran…Read more
