Lily's Room (Part2)

1. (https://itunalily.hatenablog.com/entry/20160721)

2016年7月21日「Elliott Abrams氏の公開講演」
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2. (https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/israel-zionism/2021/06/what-can-be-done-politically-to-weaken-hamas/?utm_source)

About the author:
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and is the chairman of the Tikvah Fund.

SYMPOSIUM
ELLIOTT ABRAMS
14 June 2021

America’s interests in Gaza are threefold: to alleviate the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinians living there, to strengthen Israel’s security, and to see an end to the control of the Gaza Strip by a terrorist group increasingly allied with Iran. Hamas stands in the way of all three, and the end of Hamas control of Gaza should underpin America’s strategy in the region over the coming years. How can this be won?

Some relevant history offers the context for my argument. In 2003 Ariel Sharon announced his decision to remove Israeli settlements from Gaza, and later decided to remove Israel’s military presence as well. Sharon had come to expect nothing from peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, and concluded that it was time for Israel to start setting its final borders. Those final borders, he said in December 2003, would not include Gaza with its then population of 1.5 million Arabs and 7,500 Jews—Jews who needed constant, costly, and difficult protection from the IDF.

Was there ever a chance that peace and democracy would prevail in Gaza? By the time Sharon moved settlers out in 2005, Arafat was dead and there was some thought that the Palestinian Authority (PA) could rule there as it did in the West Bank—not a model democracy, but after Arafat’s death a somewhat stable place whose security forces worked closely with the United States and with Israel against terrorism. Sharon did not help the PA take over Gaza, arguing (to the Bush administration, in which I served) that the only way he could maintain political support from a divided Israel for withdrawing from Gaza was by saying it was done purely for Israeli interests and utterly without cooperating with the Palestinians. Within days, all the Israeli settlements—including valuable and productive greenhouses—had been destroyed by rioters and marauders. Within two years, Hamas had seized power, after killing, imprisoning, or driving out PA security forces.

Between 2005-2007, during the years of PA rule, the United States was much involved with Gaza—negotiating between Israel and the PA an “Agreement on Movement and Access” of people and goods going to or from Gaza, and trying to resolve disputes. But since Hamas took over, the United States has left Gaza to Israel and Egypt to handle—with some Qatari money as grease. The U.S. government will not deal with Hamas because it is a terrorist group. Israel and Egypt control goods and people moving in and out, trying to limit smuggling while permitting food, medicine, and other material in. And Egypt has been the negotiator helping end all the rounds of war between Israel and Hamas.

In the aftermath of the most recent war, and with a new U.S. president in office, more thought is being given to whether these repeated rounds of conflict are inevitable. Israel will benefit if they can be avoided, as will the Palestinians in Gaza who are killed, injured, and immiserated because Hamas chooses to attack Israel. And, as mentioned, America’s interests will also be served by a cessation of these conflicts and the weakening of an Iranian-supported terrorist group. For a brief period after Sharon announced that Israel would leave Gaza there were dreamy, utopian statements from Palestinians and even some Israelis. Shimon Peres thought Gaza could be a tourist haven and a sort of Singapore on the Med. But today the question is not how Gaza can become rich, or even how it can escape poverty. The question is how the Gaza Strip can be freed from the grip of Hamas.

That is the question worth serious debate: is it possible over time to pry Gaza from the hands of Hamas?
Will someone conquer Hamas and Gaza? I well recall the statement to me by the head of Egyptian military intelligence in 2005, as Israel prepared its exit from Gaza: “Do not worry. Hamas will not take over. Egypt will prevent it.” He may even have believed this. Even with Egypt having undergone several fundamental changes in leadership, it was no less true then as it is true now that Egypt’s government is unfriendly to Hamas but will not remove it. For its part, Israel does not wish to reconquer and rule Gaza, because that would require a long and costly war and the permanent stationing of many troops there. Moreover, Israel would then be solely responsible for the well-being of Gaza’s population.

Israel has chosen instead to deter Hamas. In May, after the most recent round of war, the former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror explained that the purpose of all the Gaza operations over the past fifteen years has been to hurt Hamas and restore quiet to people living in the south—not to topple the terror groups or conquer the Strip. Israel didn’t embark on Operation Guardian of the Walls with the goal of winning. The goal was to inflict maximum damage on Hamas’s military capabilities, in hopes of establishing deterrence. . . .

Conventional deterrence may be a way to manage this conflict, but it will not hasten its end. Nor can Hamas be “defeated” by improving life in Gaza, as if Hamas’s goals were a higher minimum wage or a lower unemployment rate. Visiting Israel in May, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said:

Across the meetings that I’ve had so far, I’ve heard a shared recognition from all sides that steps need to be taken, work needs to be done, to address the underlying conditions that helped fuel this latest conflict. The ceasefire creates space to begin to take those steps. . . . But we all know that is not enough; . . . we have to break the cycle of violence. Leaders on both sides will need to chart a better course, starting by making real improvements in the lives of people in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. I’m convinced that if they do, they will find willing partners in both Israeli and Palestinian civil society.

Fire the speechwriter. The “underlying conditions” did not lead to the recent conflict, unless the existence of the state of Israel is the “underlying condition” in question. That is what Hamas seeks to change. Nor is there a “cycle of violence” and Blinken should stop using that morally neutral phrase. Nor is Hamas interested in “real improvements in the lives of people” in Gaza: Hamas barely even mentioned Gaza in explaining why it attacked Israel in May.

If the conquest of Gaza by Israel is not in the cards, and neither conventional deterrence nor improving “underlying conditions” will affect Hamas’ desire to bombard Israel, what can be done over the next decade? The only possible way to remove or at least badly undermine Hamas in the long run is political: it is by reducing its level of support, building up support for alternative groups, and preventing it from ruling by sheer force. A key problem today is that there is no alternative that is more attractive to Palestinians.

Opinion polls suggest that Palestinians of Gaza would like for Hamas to be replaced. The polls taken this year before PA president Mahmoud Abbas cancelled the May 22 parliamentary election showed the unenthusiastic level of Hamas’ support. Forty percent in the West Bank and 34 percent in Gaza supported the Fatah Party, while 15 percent in the West Bank and 33 percent in Gaza supported Hamas. The former Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan, a Gazan by origin who was thrown out of Fatah for opposing Mahmoud Abbas and has not visited Gaza in well over a decade, had 17-percent support in Gaza. The point is that Hamas has very far from overwhelming support. In a free election it is unlikely that they would win power, even when opposed by corrupt, incompetent Fatah bosses. In Gaza, which they have controlled for fourteen years, two-thirds of the populace oppose them.

So what is to be done? First, all those promises being made by the Biden administration about helping the people of Gaza and not Hamas must be kept. Donors must ensure that their gifts do not go through Hamas or strengthen it. Instead, use NGOs that have some independence—or create new ones. Bank on the belief that most Gazans want food, medicine, hospitals, schools, and jobs more than they want Hamas. The choice put to Gazans should be stark and should be repeatedly stated publicly to them, in Arabic: Hamas can rebuild its arsenals or donors can start rebuilding Gaza. Make Hamas stand between the public and the benefits they want.

That is an essential precondition of political reform, but it is not enough. Gazans and all Palestinians must be presented with better options than Hamas or Fatah, the same choices they have faced for decades. It was a mistake in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections to permit Hamas to run unless it met the conditions set by the “Quartet” of the U.S., Russia, EU, and UN: namely to renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and stand by previously signed agreements. That mistake was about to be repeated in 2021, until Abbas called off the elections for an entirely different reason: that he was going to lose. As the opinion polling previously mentioned suggests, Hamas was not likely to get a majority (in 2006, it won 44 percent of the vote to Fatah’s 41 percent) but Abbas wasn’t either. During the campaign, opposition to Abbas and his cronies arose from within Fatah and he might not even have won a plurality.

Electoral politics have been missing from the West Bank and Gaza for years, and so there was no great cost for Hamas to be excluded from elections that did not take place. But if the political system opens up and there are choices for voters to make, being excluded is a real cost and it may induce some Palestinians to break from Hamas. Its version of politics—as we see in Gaza, an Islamist dictatorship enforced with guns—cannot be undermined when its competition, as we see in the West Bank, is equally undemocratic and even more corrupt, though more secular and less brutal. The goal should be to undermine Hamas by showing Gazans, over time, that there are better alternatives than perpetual rule by an Islamist proxy of Iran, and moreover, that those alternatives are real and indeed are visible in the West Bank.

The bet is that if this is offered, Gazans will not choose to live in another Lebanon, whose population is only 22-percent Shiite but where the entire nation is controlled by Hizballah because of the threat and use of violent coercion. Hizballah is a reminder for Gazans, for Israel, and for us of what could happen if Iranian support for Hamas is not blocked and if Hamas is not attacked politically.
　
Israeli deterrence of the kind Amidror advocates will be needed for many years. But what is also needed is a long-range political strategy to undermine Hamas, whose control of Gaza appears to be opposed by two-thirds of Gazans.

What would a long-range political offensive against Hamas look like? It would mean that we promote competition among Palestinian political groups and leaders, but we exclude terrorists. That in itself means pushing for more freedom of speech and press than the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas likes to permit. It would mean strong efforts against corruption in the PA. It would mean pressing for free elections, as long as they exclude terrorist groups and their representatives. It would mean supporting honest and able Palestinian officials, whether mayors, governors, legislators, educators, security officials, or any other sort. How? With rhetoric and gifts of prestige (through meetings at high levels with foreign officials, visits to foreign capitals, and the like) and by making sure that our and other donors’ assistance is available as often as is appropriate for such officials to allocate, so that there is an actual advantage to those who act with integrity and are rivals to Hamas. It would mean constant pressure (especially by the United States on other donors, Western and Arab) to be sure that assistance does not go through or strengthen Hamas in Gaza. It would mean the strongest possible efforts to prevent smuggling of weapons into Gaza or reconstruction of Hamas’s weapons factories and warehouses.

All this may fail, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza. It may also be that in the end, too many Palestinians will cling to the Hamas dream of destroying Israel and will support violence and terror. And it may be that Hamas cannot be defeated until there is regime change in Iran, which is today its main supporter. Israel and its allies will have to deal with all that if it proves to be true. But relying on the Palestinian Authority has failed and will fail, and Israel has no present desire to invade and conquer and (worse yet) rule Gaza. The alternative is to try politics.

Give Palestinians an open choice between Hamas and decent government without corruption and terror. It is a choice they have never had except in the few months after Arafat died. As we know from the record of the PA and Fatah since then, that would not solve the deep divisions between Israel and the Palestinians. But it may weaken the Hamas hold on Gaza, and that is an objective worth seeking. Put another way, Israel, the United States, and many Western and Arab donor countries want to see Hamas out of power in Gaza. Let’s see if Palestinians can be enlisted in achieving that objective.

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1.（https://martinkramer.org/sandbox_blog/home/）

Dr. Martin Kramer
I am a historian of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University (and past director of its Middle East center), and the Walter P. Stern Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
I was the founding president of Shalem College, a liberal arts school in Jerusalem, and first chair of its Middle East and Islamic studies program. I have been a visiting professor or fellow at Brandeis, Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Wilson Center. I earned my undergrad and doctoral degrees from Princeton, where I wrote my thesis under the supervision of Bernard Lewis.
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2.（https://martinkramer.org/2006/05/31/hamas-of-the-intellectuals/）

Hamas of the Intellectuals
31 May 2006
by Dr.Martin Kramer

The late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American icon, described the role of the intellectual as “speaking truth to power.” In that spirit, many Palestinian academics and thinkers broke with Yasir Arafat and Fatah, accusing them of corruption and compromise.
These intellectuals are nearly all secularists, who’ve long insisted to the world that the cause of Palestine is also the cause of revolution, equality, and democracy. So now that Hamas rules, are these intellectuals speaking the same truth to (and about) the Islamists who’ve become the new power?

No one knows what guidance Edward Said would offer were he alive today. But during his last decade (he died in 2003), he made occasional reference to Hamas (and Islamic Jihad). When these references are assembled, as they are below, they convey a consistent message. Palestinian intellectuals seem to have ignored it, as they rush headlong to embrace an Islamist regime.
Said made his first reference to Hamas in 1993, after two visits to the West Bank. At the time, Hamas hadn’t yet become a household word in the West. Nor had it perfected the method of the suicide attack. Said was underwhelmed by the encounter:

In 1992 when I was there, I briefly met a few of the student leaders who represent Hamas: I was impressed by their sense of political commitment but not at all by their ideas. In 1993 I arranged to spend some more hours with them and with their rivals for political sway, Islamic Jihad. I found them quite moderate when it came to accepting the truths of modern science, for instance (interestingly the four young men I spoke to were students with outstanding records: all of them were scientists or engineers); hopelessly reductive in their views of the West; and irrefragably opposed to the existence of Israel. “The Jews have to leave,” one of them said categorically, “except for the ones who were here before 1948.” … In the main, their ideas are protests against Israeli occupation, their leaders neither especially visible nor impressive, their writings rehashes of old nationalist tracts, now couched in an “Islamic” idiom. (The Politics of Dispossession, pp. 403-5.)

In 1994, Tariq Ali interviewed Said for the BBC, and Said repeated his opinion that Hamas had no ideas on offer:

In my opinion, their ideas about an Islamic state are completely inchoate, unconvincing to anybody who lives there. Nobody takes that aspect of their programme seriously. When you question them, as I have, both on the West Bank and elsewhere: “What are your economic policies? What are your ideas about power stations, or housing?”, they reply: “Oh, we’re thinking about that.” There is no social programme that could be labelled “Islamic.” I see them as creatures of the moment, for whom Islam is an opportunity to protest against the current stalemate, the mediocrity and bankruptcy of the ruling party.

That same year, 1994, Said sharpened his critique of Hamas, even as the movement gained momentum as an oppositional force:

As to Hamas and its actions in the Occupied Territories, I know that the organization is one of the only ones expressing resistance…. Yet for any secular intellectual to make a devil’s pact with a religious movement is, I think, to substitute convenience for principle. It is simply the other side of the pact we made during the past several decades with dictatorship and nationalism, for example, supporting Saddam Hussein when he went to war with “the Persians.” (Peace and its Discontents, p. 111.)

By placing Hamas in the same box as Saddam, and by equating Islamism with dictatorship, Said left little room for doubt as to the responsibility of the secular critic.

In 1996, the year Hamas gained international notoriety with a series of devastating suicide bombings, Said found still more disparaging adjectives for the growing movement of “Islamic resistance”:

Unfortunately, it is not to my taste, it is not secular resistance. Look at some of the Islamic movements, Hamas on the West Bank, the Islamic Jihad, etc. They are violent and primitive forms of resistance. You know, what Hobsbawn calls pre-capital, trying to get back to communal forms, to regulate personal conduct with simpler and simpler reductive ideas. (Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 416.)

In 2000, Said again returned to the poverty of ideas in Hamas:

They don’t have a message about the future. You can’t simply say Islam is the only solution. You have to deal with problems of electricity, water, the environment, transportation. Those can’t be Islamic. So they’ve failed on that level. (Culture and Resistance, p. 62.)

In 2002, in the midst of the second intifada, Said made his last and most devastating critique of the Islamists, chiding Arafat for allowing them to wreak havoc with the cause:

He [Arafat] never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suited Israel perfectly so that it would have a ready-made excuse to use the so-called martyrs’ (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing that has done us more harm as a cause than Arafat’s ruinous regime, it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain, no one has been able to say. (From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, p. 185.)

So from an early date, Said discovered that Hamas hadn’t a clue as to how to govern. He described it as gripped by “hopelessly reductive” ideas. He dismissed its violent resistance as “primitive” and “mindless,” and deplored that violence for doing more harm to the Palestinian cause than the harm done by Arafat. Above all, he warned secular intellectuals against concluding a “devil’s pact” with Hamas that would sacrifice principle to convenience. Said would not compromise his secularism. In 1999, he succinctly explained why he could not ally himself with Islamists, even in the shared cause Palestine: “First, I am secular; second, I do not trust religious movements; and third, I disagree with these movements’ methods, means, analyses, values, and visions.”(Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 437.)

Given Said’s standing as the guiding light of Palestinian intellectuals, it’s remarkable that not a single one has echoed his critique of Hamas since the Palestinian elections. To the contrary: several of them have rushed to enter that “devil’s pact” against which he warned.
For example, there is Said’s own nephew, Saree Makdisi, a professor of literature at UCLA, who keeps a weblog, “Speaking Truth to Power.” (The title suggests that he’s especially qualified to keep Said’s flame alive.) But Makdisi seems to have forgotten his uncle’s dismissal of Hamas rhetoric as “rehashes of old nationalist tracts,” when writing these fawning words in praise of an article by the Damascus-based commissar of Hamas, Khalid Meshaal.

Meshaal revives the language of genuine struggle rather than that of hopelessness and defeat; he relies on the unapologetic rhetoric of national liberation, rather than the tired cliches and bureaucratic language (“performance,” “interim status”) borrowed from Israeli and American planners…. What was refreshing about Meshaal’s piece was his use of a defiant language of struggle.

Similarly, George Bisharat, a University of California law professor and activist, wrote an op-ed praising the Palestinians for doing exactly what Said said he could never do on principle: trust a religious movement:

The Palestinians have gained a government with spine—one they trust will be far less yielding of their fundamental rights. It is to the shame of the secular nationalist Palestinian movement that it was not the one to offer this alternative. One day, Palestinians will have to wrestle with questions of what kind of polity they truly want, Islamic or other. For now, they have entrusted their future to Hamas, and the world will have to grapple with their democratic choice.

Issa Khalaf, Palestinian-American author of a book on Palestinian politics and holder of an Oxford Ph.D., shared nothing of Said’s view of Hamas policy as a danger to the Palestinian cause. To the contrary: in an op-ed he hailed the Hamas “strategy” as “eminently sound, including its principled defense of the Palestinians’ core interests, its efforts to create a national consensus and a countervailing balance to the one-sided American-Israeli alliance.” He also added his expert assurance that “its Islamist militancy will be dramatically curtailed upon assumption of the perquisites and symbols of state power.” (“There is no question in my mind,” he insisted.)

After the elections, Rami Khouri, the Palestinian-Jordanian columnist now based in Beirut, went to meet a few Hamas members, in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Barajneh in Beirut. Unlike Said, he came away glowing from his encounter (which lasted all of two-and-a-half hours). In an article entitled “Talking to the Guys from Hamas,” he reported his epiphany:

What does one learn from such encounters? The two most significant themes that emerge from discussions with Hamas officials, and from their many statements, are a commitment to national principles and a clear dose of political pragmatism… Hamas will surely continue its three-year-old slow shift towards more pragmatism and realism, because it is now politically accountable to the entire Palestinian population, and to world public opinion. Incumbency means responsibility and accountability, which inevitably nurture practicality and reasonable compromises.

All the evidence so far indicates that the promise of such an “inevitable” transformation has not been kept. Of course, it’s a promise Hamas itself never made; it was made instead by Palestinian intellectuals and their Western academic allies. In making it, they hurriedly jettisoned their own secular principles. “I do not trust religious movements,” said Edward Said. Since the election of Hamas, not a single Palestinian intellectual has dared to repeat that sentence. Instead, an entire raft of them (the sample above is comprised entirely of nominal Christians) has insisted that those whom Hamas openly reviles should trust the “Islamic Resistance,” and conclude just the sort of “devil’s pact” that would strengthen its grip on the Palestinian cause. (Rami Khouri has gone the farthest, openly urging Arab liberals to ally with the mighty Islamists on the basis of their shared “core values.”)

Admittedly, there is no more dangerous enterprise in the Middle East than speaking truth to (and about) Islamist power. But it’s another sign of the weakness of the Palestinian people that it hasn’t a single intellectual who remembers how to do it.

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