The War on Palestine, Part 4 - the Palestinian Authority, the Rise of Hamas and the Siege of Gaza

In Part 1 of this series I dealt with the rise of Zionism, the British Mandate in Palestine, the Nakba and the creation of Israel.  Part 2 dealt with the creation of the PLO and its guerilla warfare against Israel, leading to its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982.  Part 3 dealt with the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords.  Here I bring the story up to the present day.

With the implementation of the Oslo Accords in 1994, the war shifted decisively into Palestine itself.  The PLO leadership moved into the occupied territories and took up the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA).  They clearly hoped that this was the first step on the road to nationhood and a lasting settlement, but they were quickly disappointed.  

Administrative Zones as per the Oslo
Accords - this is a simplified version

Rashid Khalidi characterises the PA’s role as primarily related to security – Israel retained effective control of water supply and electricity, border control and large aspects of land use.  Large parts of the occupied territories - those that were the sites of Israeli settlements, illegal under international law – were excluded from the PA’s control and protected by Israeli troops.  The Israelis also didn’t agree to pause settlement building so new settlements were created and expansion of existing settlements continued, with Palestinians often evicted from their lands and homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.  

The Palestinian territories are not contiguous, so to travel between the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Palestinians had to pass checkpoints both to exit into Israeli territory and to re-enter Palestinian territory, all manned by Israeli troops.  Often they were refused passage.  The West Bank itself was also increasingly split by barriers between Israeli settlements and Palestinian territory.  The inability to travel between parts of the territory and the difficulty of getting goods and people in and out crippled the Palestinian economy, leading to high levels of unemployment and struggling businesses.  

In this situation  the Oslo accords were seen by a lot of Palestinians as a clever tactic of co-option – instead of Palestinian rebels being directly policed by the Israeli army, they were now policed by the Palestinian Authority, led by the PLO/Fatah.  The PA often acted repressively, especially against Hamas operatives or suspects, detaining them and torturing them in much the same way the Israelis had, earning the enmity of large parts of the population.  On the other hand, if they failed to suppress militants the Israelis would accuse them of purposefully harbouring them, using this as an excuse for direct military intervention or to refuse further talks on the creation of the Palestinian State.  Hence, the Second Intifada, starting in 2002, was as much a expression of lack of confidence in the PA as of defiance of the Israelis.  

This set the scene for the rise of Hamas and its smaller ally, Islamic Jihad.  Hamas was formed in 1987 as an outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  Its founders were frustrated at what they saw as the Brotherhood’s lenient stance towards Israel and wanted to be more militant.  The Israelis were initially accommodating towards Hamas, despite what Khalidi describes as its ‘antisemitism and commitment to violence’, because they saw it as a way of splitting the Palestinian resistance.  

The rise of Hamas was part of a regional trend that represented a response to what many perceived as the bankruptcy of the secular nationalist ideologies that had dominated the politics of the Middle East for most of the 20th century.  In the wake of the PLO’s shift away from armed struggle and towards a diplomatic path meant to achieve a Palestinian state that failed to achieve results, many Palestinians felt that the organisation had lost its way – and Hamas grew in consequence, despite its extremely conservative social positions and the sketchy outline of the future it proposed….  The signing of the Oslo accords had a similar effect in both raising Palestinian expectations and temporarily undermining Hamas.  But given the PLO’s standing was linked to the results of its dealings with Israel, the widespread popular disappointment that followed the implementation of the Oslo Accords left Hamas poised to reap the rewards, and it sharpened its critique of the PLO and the newly formed PA.

Mahmoud Abbas

With ‘Arafat’s death in 2004, Mahmoud ‘Abbas inherited leadership of Fatah and became PA President in the 2005 election.  Hamas boycotted this election as it had all previous PA elections because if its refusal to recognise the PA’s legitimacy.  However, it reversed this policy and ran candidates in the PA elections in January 2006, winning 74 of the 132 seats against Fatah’s 45.  This was not so much an endorsement of its Islamist policies – it even received majorities in Christian neighbourhoods – as of the general perception that Fatah was both incompetent and corrupt.  

After this election there was considerable pressure from Palestinians – expressed among other things in a document called the Prisoners Declaration put together by the leaders of Fatah, Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad who were in Israeli jails - for a peace deal between the factions and a unity government.  Prisoners carry immense prestige in the Palestinian community as their imprisonment was seen as a sign of determined resistance to Israel – at the time of the Declaration over 400,000 Palestinians had been imprisoned or detained at some point in their lives.  Hence this declaration can be seen as an expression of substantial popular will for a strong, unified leadership.

There were lots of negotiations between the factions but the process was vehemently opposed by Israel and the US, both of which refused to recognise any kind of Hamas leadership or involvement or have any dealings with Hamas.  As a precondition to recognition they demanded Hamas recognise Israel and alter its constitution accordingly, but did not offer any concessions in return – precisely the same dilemma the PLO faced during the Oslo process.  Hamas did not repeat the PLO's mistake, so agreement was never reached and civil war broke out between the two parties which ended with Fatah in control of the West Bank (at least, the bits under PA control) and East Jerusalem, while Hamas retained control of Gaza.  To all intents and purposes there were now two rival Palestinian authorities and Israel was free to go on with its colonisation process while saying there was no credible Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate.

Israel moved rapidly to cement this situation.  In 2005 in had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza, dismantling Israeli settlements there and withdrawing its military to the border, leaving Gaza as an exclusively Palestinian enclave.  

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege.  Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; food supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted.  Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2008 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty, and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much larger rates for youth and women. … Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swathes of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.  Some neighbourhoods, such as Shuja’iyya and part of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction.  The casualty rates tell only part of the story, although they are revealing.  In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors.  A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations.  The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.  

This was essentially where we had got to in 2023.  There were no further elections in Gaza and Hamas retained control.  The siege was enforced by land and sea, including at the Rafah crossing into Egypt where the Egyptians agreed to cooperate with the Israeli military to limit traffic.  Palestinians wanting or needing the leave Gaza for any reason, including to work in Israel, needed to pass through Israeli checkpoints where they would be searched, questioned and often turned back without explanation.  From time to time Hamas and Islamic Jihad would launch largely ineffectual rocket attacks into Israel, to be answered by lethal strikes from much more sophisticated Israeli weapons.  Meanwhile, settlement activity continued in the West Bank and Palestinians in East Jerusalem continued to be dispossessed of their homes in favour of Israelis.  

The ’peace process’ launched with much fanfare and hope thirty years ago was effectively dead.  The Israelis, having ensured the collapse of the PA, were able to go on claiming that there was ‘no realistic partner for peace’ on the Palestinian side.  They allowed just enough goods into Gaza and the West Bank to keep them afloat, including facilitating (or at least permitting) substantial Qatari aid to Hamas.  It was in the interest of the right-wing politicians of Likud and its allies to maintain this stalemate, as it played to their increasingly strident Zionist rhetoric and made their Labour opponents look weak.  This set up a vicious cycle where in order to maintain this coalition the Israeli government was forced to support ongoing settlement, leading to further Palestinian frustration, more violence and increasing repression of Palestinians.  The situation was inherently unstable because it was impossible for the Palestinians to accept their imprisonment and dispossession indefinitely.

When Hamas launched its attack on October 7, 2023, my first thought was, ‘oh no!’.  It was not surprise at the attack, although it was surprising that they managed to do as much damage as they did.  It was a sinking feeling as to what I knew would follow.  Hamas had decided to break the stalemate by launching a major, bloody attack.  It would no longer be enough for Israel to simply launch rockets at them, and in a full scale war there could only be one winner.  

I don’t want to dwell on this here, because we have all been reading and hearing about it in real time over the past six months.  I don’t know how it will end.  I hope for the best – a lasting peace settlement – but fear the worst, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by the Israeli forces, enabled by the refusal of the US to prevent it.  Hopefully the pressure of world opinion – including popular opinion within the US – will force Biden’s hand.  Time will tell.  

What I wanted to point out here in this series was that this is not an isolated event, it is merely the latest – and bloodiest – chapter in a war that has been going on for over a century.  If you look through this and the previous parts of this series, you will see that what is going on in the current bloodbath - the use of terrorism and surprise Palestinian attacks on 'soft targets', the overwhelming military superiority of Israel, the disproportionate death tolls, the targeting of civilians and destruction of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military - are not new developments but simply 'more of the same', the old tactics taken to a new level.  In this war, the Israeli/Zionist forces have always had the upper hand, and it has been the Palestinians who suffer the most.  In the final post of this series, I will consider some of the wider issues this long conflict raises.