Hamas’s Chances
Nathan Thrall
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances
Après les accords de cessez-le-feu du 21 Novembre 2012 non respectés par Israël, l’éloignement de l’axe Syrie Iran Hezbollah, le renversement de Morsi, l’activisme forcené anti frères musulmans de l’Arabie Saoudite et assimilés, l’impuissance de la Turquie et du Qatar, il ne restait plus au #Hamas, non sans appréhension, que de confier les clés de Gaza à #Mahmoud_Abbas. Et de fait, les coups bas de Abbas sous pression étasunienne, et cela avant même le meurtre des 3 Israéliens, ne se sont pas fait attendre.
Hamas paid a high price, acceding to nearly all of Fatah’s demands. The new PA government didn’t contain a single Hamas member or ally, and its senior figures remained unchanged. Hamas agreed to allow the PA to move several thousand members of its security forces back to Gaza, and to place its guards at borders and crossings, with no reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Most important, the government said it would comply with the three conditions for Western aid long demanded by the US and its European allies: non-violence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel. Though the agreement stipulated that the PA government refrain from politics, Abbas said it would pursue his political programme. Hamas barely protested.
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The fears of Hamas activists were confirmed after the government was formed. The terms of the agreement were not only unfavourable but unimplemented. The most basic conditions of the deal – payment of the government employees who run Gaza and an opening of the crossing with Egypt – were not fulfilled. For years Gazans had been told that the cause of their immiseration was Hamas rule. Now it was over, their conditions only got worse.
On 12 June, ten days after the new government was formed, an unexpected event radically changed Hamas’s fortunes. Three Israeli students at yeshivas in the West Bank were kidnapped and murdered. When their bodies were found, a group of Israeli Jews abducted a 16-year-old Palestinian outside his East Jerusalem home, doused him in petrol, and burned him alive. Protests erupted among Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Negev and Galilee, while the West Bank remained relatively quiet. Israel blamed Hamas for the murders of the yeshiva students, though several Israeli security officials have said they believe that the perpetrators didn’t act on orders from above.
In its search for the suspected murderers, Israel carried out its largest West Bank campaign against Hamas since the Second Intifada, closing its offices and arresting hundreds of members at all levels. Hamas denied responsibility for the abductions and said Israel’s accusations were a pretext to launch a new offensive against it. Among those arrested were more than fifty of the 1027 security prisoners released in 2011 by Israel in exchange for the Hamas-held Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Hamas saw the arrests as another violation of the Shalit agreement, which had named conditions under which the released prisoners could be re-arrested and contained unfulfilled commitments by Israel to improve conditions and visitation rights for other Palestinian prisoners.
*The Palestinian leadership in Ramallah worked closely with Israel to catch the militants, and had rarely been so discredited among its constituents, many of whom believe abducting Israelis has proved the only effective means of gaining the release of prisoners widely regarded as national heroes. In several West Bank cities, residents protested against the PA’s security co-operation with Israel. A former minister of religious affairs who is close to Abbas went with his bodyguards to al-Aqsa Mosque; worshippers assaulted them, and they had to be hospitalised. When an Abbas emissary was dispatched to visit the murdered Palestinian boy’s grieving family, he was shouted off the premises.
As protests spread through Israel and Jerusalem, militants in Gaza from non-Hamas factions began firing rockets and mortars in solidarity. Sensing Israel’s vulnerability and the Ramallah leadership’s weakness, Hamas leaders called for the protests to grow into a third intifada. When the rocket fire increased, they found themselves drawn into a new confrontation: they couldn’t be seen suppressing the rocket attacks while calling for a mass uprising. Israel’s retaliation culminated in the 6 July bombings that killed seven Hamas militants, the largest number of fatalities inflicted on the group in several months. The next day Hamas began taking responsibility for the rockets. Israel then announced Operation Protective Edge.
Les #Etats-Unis et leur protégé semblent maintenant faire marche arrière, après des centaines de #morts #innocents.
... there are growing signs that Hamas stands a good chance of achieving some of [its goals]. Obama and Kerry have said they believe a ceasefire should be based on the November 2012 agreement. The US also changed its position on the payment of salaries, proposing in a draft framework for a ceasefire submitted to Israel on 25 July that funds be transferred to Gazan employees. Over the course of the war, Israel decided that it could solve its Gaza problem with help from the new government in Ramallah that it had formally boycotted. The Israeli defence minister said he hoped a ceasefire would place the new government’s security forces at Gaza’s border crossings. Netanyahu has begun to soften his tone towards Abbas. Near the end of the third week of fighting, Israel and the US quietly looked away as the Palestinian government made payments to all employees in Gaza for the first time. Israeli officials across the political spectrum have begun to admit privately that the previous policy towards Gaza was a mistake. All parties involved in mediating a ceasefire envision postwar arrangements that effectively strengthen the new Palestinian government and its role in Gaza – and by extension Gaza itself.
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The obvious solution is to let the new Palestinian government return to Gaza and reconstruct it. Israel can claim it is weakening Hamas by strengthening its enemies. Hamas can claim it won the recognition of the new government and a significant lifting of the blockade. This solution would of course have been available to Israel, the US, Egypt and the PA in the weeks and months before the war began, before so many lives were shattered .
#honte #victimes_civiles, #crimes #Israel #Israël
