Hamas

‘It’s not unreasonable and it’s actually instructive in some respects,’ said David Pollock, the Kaufman Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, when I asked him if one can draw a sensible comparison between Hamas and IS (or ISIL, as it’s often called). Having served in senior State Department positions during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, Pollock knows both the Israeli-Palestinian and Iraqi theatres intimately.

Common to Hamas and IS, Pollock argued, is the existence of an ‘uncompromising goal and the adoption of violent means towards that goal. A commitment to jihad, in one form or another, is shared by Hamas and IS.’ A similar point was made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when, on September 29, he told the UN General Assembly that IS and Hamas are ‘branches of the same poisonous tree’ – a comment that led a wary Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, to respond that IS ‘poses a different threat to Western interests and to the United States.’.

There are distinctions, Pollock said – Hamas is ‘particularly Palestinian’, as he put it, and does not ground its message upon the vision of a global Islamic caliphate – but more significant is the fact that neither of the two terrorist organisations is amenable to political or strategic compromise.

Although Hamas emerged from Operation Protective Edge, the seven week Israeli counter-offensive in Gaza, with virtually no tangible results to bolster the exhausted Gazan population, the experience of the third armed conflict with Israel since 2008 has not shifted its distaste for a negotiating process that would require it to recognise the Jewish state. Less than a month after the operation came to a close, Ismail Haniyeh, the deputy chief of the Hamas political bureau, ruled out negotiations on disarmament and an eventual political resolution by restating the core principles which have guided the organisation since its founding in 1987. ‘The weapons of the resistance are legitimate, and will remain in place until the entire land of Palestine is liberated,’ Haniyeh asserted. ‘The weapons of the resistance need to be left out of the debate. It is a red line that is not to be touched.’

Statements like these do not come as a surprise to Pollock. ‘My understanding, based on very detailed analysis in Arabic of Hamas literature, and personal interviews that I’ve been able to conduct over the years with senior Hamas figures, and others with access to the Hamas leadership and rank-and-file, has convinced me that the idea that Hamas could moderate, or that there are moderates in Hamas who could somehow be enticed into the peace process, is a fantasy,’ he said. ‘It’s in the very nature of Hamas to insist that there can never be peace with Israel, that there can only be tactical ceasefires – what they call in Arabic a ‘hudna.’ Permanent peace with Israel is just not acceptable. They have never varied from that position, and I don’t see any sign that they could ever vary from that position.’

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.