Israel, Europe and the USA must talk to Hamas now

By Uri Avnery*

29 January 2006

Uri Avnery calls on Israel - and the US and Europe - to do the inevitable and talk to Hamas now, rather than later after much blood is spilled. He urges them not to get bogged down in slogans, like "Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel". He says: "A group that is ready to negotiate with Israel, thereby already recognizes the State of Israel. And if it is not ready to negotiate, the problem does not arise. A matter of simple logic."

Like two very tired wrestlers who clasp each other, unable to separate, the Israeli and Palestinian societies are glued to each other.

The Palestinian elections this week took place in the shadow of the Israeli elections. Who is Ehud Olmert? Has the Labour Party really changed? Will the next Israeli government really be prepared to negotiate? Which Palestinian leadership stands a better chance of liberating us from the occupation?

The Israeli elections, in exactly two months, will take place in the shadow of the Palestinian elections. What to do about the Hamas victory? Should we be ready to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes - God forbid! - Hamas ministers?

Palestinians know a lot about the Israeli democracy. But for Israelis, the Palestinian democracy is an unknown quantity.

Of course, elections, by themselves, do not prove that a system is really democratic. There are all kinds of elections.

There used to be elections in the Soviet Union. A voter entered a polling station, was given a sealed envelope and told to put it into the ballot box. "Why, am I not allowed to know for whom I am voting?" he asked. "Of course not," the official retorted indignantly, "in the Soviet Union, we respect the secrecy of the ballot!"

The opposite was true in an Egyptian village that I visited years ago on election day. The place was in a joyful, carnival mood. At the polling station, everything was open and aboveboard. What is there to hide? Good-natured policemen helped old ladies to put the right vote (Mubarak) into the box. There was no other candidate.

But nobody who visited the West Bank in recent weeks could doubt for a moment that here a real democracy is growing - the first home-grown Arab democracy. True, there were some signs of anarchy, here and there armed groups threatened each other. But these were marginal events, greatly exaggerated by the media. The competition was real, the parties were real, politicians competed for power and influence. Every flat surface in towns and villages was plastered with colourful posters. Deafening loudspeakers blared slogans and songs. And, most importantly, the voters were faced with a real choice between alternative and clear agendas - something that is not at all certain in the Israeli elections.

It is not easy to conduct elections under occupation, when the occupier is overtly fighting against one of the major parties, arresting and even killing candidates, keeping important leaders in prison, maintaining roadblocks everywhere. And, as is to be expected, when a dumb military machine interferes in political matters, the results are the opposite of those intended: the declarations and actions of the Israeli government against Hamas have mostly helped Hamas.

I spoke with one of the Fatah leaders about the actions of the Israeli government against Hamas in occupied East Jerusalem, where meetings were banned, candidates arrested and posters torn down. The man laughed: "What do they think? That the Hamas people need meetings and posters to know who to vote for? All these things only add to their appeal!" The results show that he was right.

Where does this Palestinian longing for democratic life stem from?

In this matter, too, there exists a wide gap between the generations - a gap that is one of the most obvious phenomena in Palestinian society.

The older generation, and especially the leaders who returned home with Yasser Arafat after the Oslo agreement, have never lived in a democratic society. Arafat himself spent his life wandering between Arab dictatorships: Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia. Lebanon, too, where every person is politically imprisoned in one or other of the authoritarian, sectarian fractions, is certainly far from being a real democracy. (Arafat always listened attentively when I held forth on the possibility of changing official Israeli policy by changing public opinion, but I did not get the impression that he had much faith in that or really believed me.) The model that the older people were thinking about was a very limited, Jordan-style "democracy".

The middle generation has quite different ideas. Tens of thousands of them have been in Israeli prisons for long stretches. There they have learned Hebrew, listened to Israeli radio and watched Israeli TV. They have seen how Israeli democracy functions. That is the model they would like to adopt. (My friend, Sirhan Salameh, now the mayor of a-Ram, who has spent a total of 12 years in prison, told me: "What we enjoyed most were the scenes in the Knesset, where everybody shouts at the prime minister. We compared this to the situation in the Arab parliaments. We decided that we want a parliament like that.")

It must be said clearly: these elections are a huge achievement for the Palestinian society, a badge of honour for a people suffering under occupation, whose independent state is still a dream. Everyone who has a hat should take it off.

In Israel this week, the Palestinian elections were the centre of political attention. Ehud Olmert, always keen to exploit his standing as acting prime minister in order to present himself as a security leader, called a meeting of the usual bunch of generals and Shin-Bet types who, as always, looked at the situation through a gunsight and exposed their usual lack of political insight. "What to do if," "How to behave when.".

What emerged from all this was that Israel will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. "We cannot be asked to negotiate with a group that calls for the destruction of Israel," etc. etc.

That is nonsense in tomato juice, as we say in Hebrew. Or, in a case like this, rather, nonsense in blood.

Israel must negotiate with whatever Palestinian leadership is elected by the Palestinian people. As in every conflict throughout history, one does not elect the leadership of the opponent - first, because the opponent will not accept this and, just as importantly, because an agreement made with such a leadership will not hold.

The broader the leadership is, the better. If an agreement is reached, it is vitally important that all sections of the Palestinian people are committed to it. And it is essential to include the most extreme factions. If Hamas had not decided to take part in the elections, it should have been forced to do so.

A group that is ready to negotiate with Israel, thereby already recognizes the State of Israel. And if it is not ready to negotiate, the problem does not arise. A matter of simple logic. But generals and politicians are not professors of logic, nor apparently do they know much about negotiations and agreements.

On the Palestinian side: the very fact that Hamas is participating in elections that are based on the Oslo agreement proves that the Palestinian political system is moving in the direction of peace. On the face of it, the Hamas victory seems to be bad for peace. But the real result may be quite different: it may moderate the radical movement and make sure that any agreement reached will be solid and permanent.

On the Israeli side: the split in the Likud, the creation of Kadima and the change in the Labour Party leadership all show that the Israeli political system is moving in the same general direction. The movement may be big or small - but the direction is clear.

After both sides form their new governments - they must talk to each other.

Deja vu!

If Ariel Sharon had not been in a deep coma, he would have jumped out of his bed for joy.

The Hamas victory fulfils his most ardent hopes.

For a whole year now, he did everything possible to undermine Mahmoud Abbas. His logic was quite obvious: the Americans wanted him to negotiate with Abbas. Such negotiations would inevitably have led to a situation that would have compelled him to give up almost all of the West Bank. Sharon had no intention of doing so. He wanted to annex about half of the territory. So he had to get rid of Abbas and his moderate image.

During the last year, the situation of the Palestinians got worse from day to day. The actions of the occupation made normal life and commerce impossible. The West Bank settlements were continuously enlarging. The [Apartheid] Wall, which cuts off about 10 per cent of the West Bank, was nearing completion. No important prisoners were released. The aim was to impress on the Palestinians that Abbas is weak ("a chicken without feathers", as Sharon put it), that he cannot achieve anything, that offering peace and observing a cease-fire leads nowhere.

The message to the Palestinians was clear: "Israel understands only the language of force."

Now the Palestinians have put in power a party that speaks this language.

Why did Hamas win?

Palestinian elections, like German ones, consist of two parts. Half the members of parliament are elected on straight party lists (like in Israel), the other half are elected individually in their districts. This gave Hamas a huge advantage.

In the party lists elections, Hamas won with only a slight majority. This would suggest that, as far as the general political line is concerned, the majority is not far from Fatah - two states, peace with Israel.

Many of the votes given to Hamas had nothing to do with peace, religion and fundamentalism, but with protest. The Palestinian administration, run almost exclusively by Fatah, is tainted with corruption. The "man in the street" felt that the people on top don't care about him. Fatah was also blamed for the terrible situation created by the occupation.

Also, the glory of the martyrs and the indomitable fight against the immensely superior Israeli army added to the popularity of Hamas.

In the personal-regional elections, the situation of Hamas was even better. Hamas had more creditable candidates, untainted by corruption. Its party machine was far superior, its members far more disciplined. In every district, there were several Fatah candidates competing with each other. After the death of Yasser Arafat, there is no strong leader capable of imposing unity. Marwan Barghouti, who could perhaps have done the job, is held in an Israeli prison - another big Israeli gift for Hamas.

People who believe in conspiracy theories can assert that it is all part of a devious Israeli plan.

Some people even believe that Hamas was an Israeli invention right from the beginning. That is, of course, a wild exaggeration. But it is indeed the case that, in the years before the first intifada, the Islamic organization was the only Palestinian group that had practically a free run in the occupied territories.

The logic went like this: Our enemy is the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Islamists hate the secular PLO and Yasser Arafat. So we can use them against the PLO.

Moreover, while all political institutions were banned, and even Palestinians who worked for peace were arrested for carrying out illegal political activity, no one could control what was happening in the mosques. "As long as they are praying, they are not shooting," was the innocent opinion in the Israeli military government.

When the first intifada broke out at the end of 1987, this was proved wrong. Hamas was formed, partly in order to compete with the Islamic Jihad fighters. Within a short time, Hamas became the core of the armed uprising. But for almost a year, the Israeli Security Service did not act against them. Then policy changed and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader, was arrested.

All this happened more through stupidity than design. Now the Israeli government is faced with a Hamas leadership that was democratically elected by the people.

What now? Well, a strong feeling of deja vu.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli government declared that it would never, ever negotiate with the PLO. They are terrorists. They have a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel. Arafat is a monster, a second Hitler. So, never, never, never...

In the end, after much bloodshed, Israel and the PLO recognized each other and the Oslo agreement was signed.

Now we are hearing the same tune again. Terrorists. Murderers. The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel. We shall never, never, never negotiate with them.

All this is very welcome to Sharon's Kadima party, which openly calls for the unilateral annexation of territory ("Fixing the borders of Israel unilaterally"). It will help the Likud and the Labour party hawks whose mantra is "We have no partner for peace," meaning - to hell with peace.

Gradually, the tone will change. Both sides, and the Americans, too, will climb down from the tall tree. Hamas will state that it is ready for negotiations and find some religious basis for this. The Israeli government (probably headed by Ehud Olmert) will bow to reality and American pressure. Europe will forget its ridiculous slogans.

In the end, everybody will agree that a peace, in which Hamas is a partner, is better than a peace with Fatah alone.

Let's pray that not too much blood is spilled before that point is reached.