Matt Yglesias

Cycle of Excuses

Steve Erlanger writes for The New York Times about the difficulties of forging a Palestinian unity government with which one could negotiate:

“This is a moment of very tough choices, with no dominant approach with obvious advantages,” said Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a policy research group in Tel Aviv. “Obama is being pushed to go for a Palestinian national unity government, negotiations and a comprehensive settlement. But it would be a mistake to push the two-state solution toward a moment of truth when it is in a moment of weakness, and when there is both a civil war and a deep constitutional crisis on the Palestinian side.”

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even some in Israel favor a national unity government that would enable the Palestinian Authority to be seen as at least notionally in charge of the rebuilding in Gaza. But even if the antipathies between Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank, could be overcome, a deal would almost certainly entail early elections that Fatah might very well lose.

The Gaza war has been bad for Fatah, and its popularity is plunging. Hamas is feeling victorious after surviving the Israeli pounding and is unlikely to allow Fatah to restore its presence, even for an election, in an angry Gaza.

This is a pretty neat trick. Israel launches a war in Gaza that’s allegedly supposed to weaken Hamas. Then Israel declares victory, even though the war has in fact strengthened Hamas and weakened Fatah. Then thanks to Fatah’s weakened position, it’s impossible to forge a unity government. But absent a unity government, it’s unreasonable for Israel to negotiate—Q.E.D.! It puts one in a mind of the time when it was impossible with Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it was run by a corrupt and incompetent Fatah. No negotiations until political reform! Then when the elections were held, it turned out that the opposition—Hamas—won. And then Israel couldn’t negotiate with Hamas!

Taken in isolation, each of these positions has a patina of reasonableness but the overall pattern is of a government that’s much more interested in finding reasons to forever-forestall negotiations—expanding settlements all the while—than in finding a route to peace.

The Things People Say

Just as you can apparently be hailed as a brilliant reporter for peddling bogus conspiracy theories about Iraqi links to al-Qaeda, it seems that stringing together random nutty quotes from Hamas figures to draw the conclusion that Hamas is an organization of unappeasable madmen now counts as brilliant analysis. But of course the problem with this sort of thing—and precisely parallel efforts with regard to Iranian leaders or Hezbollah leaders or whomever else—is that when you look at the record as a whole it turns out that people say all kinds of things. Yesterday, for example, Israel killed a senior Hamas guy named Said Sayyam who was prone to saying stuff like this:

The air strike on Sayyam was apparently an attempt by Israel to deliver an image of victory in its offensive against Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces understands that Hamas’ agreement in principle to the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza signals that the campaign is nearing its end.

In an interview with Haaretz in November 1995, Sayyam said, “I do not hate [Israelis] for being Jewish or Israeli but because of what they have done to us. Because of the acts of occupation.”

In response to a question about whether he saw a chance for change in relations between Palestinians and Israelis, he said, “It is difficult to forget what was done to us. If the reason for the hate will not exist, everything is possible.”

Now what’s the “real” Hamas here? Honestly, I have no idea. I have no idea how it is that people reach such firm conclusion about who it is and isn’t possible to negotiate with. I think the record of history is simply that these things are very uncertain. If you look, for example, at the series of events from the Anglo-Irish War through the Irish Civil War and the Irish Free State era, I don’t really know how anyone would have predicted in advance which people would turn out to be the irreconcilables and which would turn out to be open to compromise.

The Dissonance

Jeffrey Goldberg had a piece on Hamas in yesterday’s New York Times that Noam Scheiber hailed as “hands down the best thing I’ve read since the Gaza conflict started.” Jon Chait deemed it “fantastic” and recommended this conclusion especially:

The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.

I wasn’t that big a fan of the piece, analytically, though it certainly is admirably witty. But be that as it may, it would certainly be desirable to see the more practical crew running Fatah having more support and control over the situation. But Israel’s attacks on Gaza are causing the reverse to happen just as the war in Lebanon 30 months ago had that effect. And, indeed, how Israel’s settlement expansions and growing network of roadblocks and special highways crossing the West Bank are weakening Fatah and the forces of Palestinian moderation. And of course recall that it was deliberate Israeli—and American—policy to weaken Fatah for years after the collapse of the Camp David talks. This “help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah” strategy is fine but it needs to be backed up by real steps. And the United States probably needs to take the lead since the Israeli political dynamic has become myopically focused on short-term issues. A president willing to demand a real freeze on settlement activity would be a great first step.

The Dog That Hasn’t Barked

One interesting issue in the current crisis is how come Hezbollah hasn’t acted aggressively to start up a second front in the north while the IDF is conducting major operations in Gaza. Abu Muquwama has some plausible sounding speculations about this. One could, I think, probably construct other scenarios. Part of the reason is almost certainly just status quo bias and inertia — on any given day, Hezbollah has a strong presumption against undertaking a dramatic escalation of the conflict with Israel.

But note that while one can adduce all kinds of reasons to explain Hezbollah’s actions, none of them are consistent with the (apparently popular in Israel as well as among US neocons) line of thinking which holds that both Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing more than puppets of Iran and extensions of Tehran’s relentless drive to eradicate Israel.

The Risk of Catastrophic Success In Gaza

It seems that Hamas was hoping to bait Israel into launching a ground operation in Gaza, operating on the belief that they’d be able to fight a successful insurgent campaign against the Israelis along the lines of what Hezbollah’s been able to do in Southern Lebanon. My guess is that history will show that calculation to be folly — the geography’s not the same, Hamas is a much more raggedy outfit, and if there’s anything the past 30 years have shown it’s that Israel can, in fact, exert effective (albeit imperfect) control over the Palestinian territories when it wants to. The human cost of land fighting will be large, but I think it’s fairly likely that Israel will be able to create a situation whereby Hamas is dislodged from formal control over Gaza.

Of course, Hamas running Gaza is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s not as if Israel was completely unconcerned with Hamas back then. On the contrary.

But as I wrote back on the 29th, something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed. Matt Duss goes into detail on this but suffice it to say that the years of fighting in Iraq have seeded the Middle East with Salfists possessing battlefield experience who are looking for new causes that people will rally behind.

Working for the Clampdown

CNN reports on new restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank:

Israel barred men younger than 50 from entering Jerusalem mosques for Friday prayers and closed West Bank border crossings in hopes of preventing protests or violence over its bombing campaign in Gaza. [...] Thousands of police officers patrolled the streets of the old city and east Jerusalem. Only Palestinian men over 50 who held Israeli-issued identity cards were allowed inside mosques to pray. No such restrictions applied to women.

Concern over potential attacks prompted Israel to close all entry points from the West Bank until Saturday night.

The Defense Ministry said it would consider allowing passage for “those in need of humanitarian or medical aid as well as other specific incidents.”

Such are the wages of life as a subject people. The Jerusalem Post writes about “a general curfew on the West Bank” being imposed, though they don’t go into detail about what exactly that means. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had no intention of killing any Israelis this morning, but everyone takes the hit. Meanwhile, I heard on NPR this morning that Hamas had specifically disclaimed any interest in a cease-fire — apparently their view is that if they can provoke Israeli into launching a bloody ground operation in Gaza that this will help their movement and nevermind the cost to people.

Why They Fight

To return to the unpleasant question of Gaza, Jon Chait had a post the other day explaining that the kind of bloodshed and suffering the Israelis are afflicting is okay because of the asymetric subjective desires of the parties to the conflict:

Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could.

One way to reply to this is à la Ezra Klein who observes that at some point you need to judge based on what’s actually happening. And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.

I’m not a believer in violence, and so I certainly don’t think that Hamas’ rocket attacks have been an appropriate, morally defensible, or effective means of protesting this one-sided bargain. But it’s important to understand that it’s simply not the case that Hamas is the only party to this conflict that’s working toward unreasonable goals.

Palin on Hamas

It’s a little hard to believe that there’s actually more bizarre stuff in Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, but Jeffrey Goldberg rightly calls attention to this revealing exchange:

KATIE COURIC: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.”

SARAH PALIN: “Yeah, well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we’re seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel … and we’re hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn’t allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.”

As Goldberg says, the issue here isn’t that she gave a bad answer, rather “the issue here is that she didn’t know the question.” Indeed. This is one of those hard questions where you don’t expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to have a quick and easy answer. But by the same token, you do expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to be aware of the basic contours of the situation — the U.S. told the Palestinians that there could be no peace deal with Israel unless they held free and fair elections, then free and fair elections were held, and Hamas won. This is especially interesting in light of the fact that Palin has an Israeli flag in her office. It ought to tell you something about Israel’s false friends in the Christian Zionist movement that they feel free to take strong positions on life-and-death issues of middle east policy without having even a vague familiarity with the situation.