The Palestinians are trying a new tact: protesting Hamas. Is it real or staged?
Of late, there have been multiple reports of protests in Gaza against Hamas. Protesters we are told via translation are screaming, “Hamas are terrorists! We are sick of Hamas!” and the like. There are those who see the protests as organic, a response to Israel’s intense post-ceasefire military activities. I’m personally not buying it—yet.
There is no question that Israel flew out of the blocks as soon as it decided to resume fighting. I have the impression, based on no particular information, that Israel used the ceasefire to its advantage. While some students go to Florida for Spring Break, others stay in the library and get ready for the final months of study. Israel apparently used drones to follow home those in the Hamas uniforms with weapons from their sick hostage transfer ceremonies. They killed in short order top Hamas political leaders as well as some military commanders. Hamas probably did not notice that Israel changed the leadership of the IDF. They always fight the last war. The new chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, is half-Yemenite. So are my kids. Hamas doesn’t stand a chance.
The reason that I do not believe that the Gaza protests are the real deal is several-fold. Firstly, those people with the signs are the same ones who jumped up and down like electrocuted hyenas when Hamas brought dead and captured Jews back to Gaza. If they have a complaint, it is that Hamas is losing. Like German generals who wanted to get rid of Hitler when the war was going badly, those protesting are not really against Hamas but rather against their change in fortune. We know that the protesters are not supported by UNRWA or USAID. UNRWA likes Jews good and dead, so they would not support any effort to stop attacks on Jews. It would appear that Fatah and Mahmud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) are playing a role in getting protesters from supportive clans out into the streets. After Hamas won the municipal elections in 2006, Fatah planned a coup against its Islamist brother. Hamas found out and killed and drove out many of those involved. Fatah would love nothing more than to embarrass and weaken Hamas. Apparently, with no new food coming in and the IDF attacking without mercy, Fatah and the PA have found an opportune time to get people into the streets without fear that they will later be thrown off any remaining tall buildings, a fate that was met by many Fatah members involved in the coup.
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There is no faction inside Gaza or even more broadly in Palestinian society that wants to live happily alongside Israel. While I would bet that most Palestinians want to make a decent wage and come home to a building that still has a roof on it, they are no lovers of the “Yehud.” They’ll tolerate the Jews to get by. Remember, thousands of Gazans worked in southern Israel prior to the pogrom and made ten times the salary of those who worked in the strip. No matter. Some participated in the attack, as victims heard and identified their voices; others provided detailed maps of the towns and kibbutzim that were annihilated. There is no peace camp in the Palestinian world and the peace camp in Israel is accordingly getting smaller and smaller. The days of Yitzchak Shamir and Shimon Peres singing on about making peace are long gone. Israelis want safety and military superiority over any threat.
What is the Gaza endgame? Hamas will be in no hurry to release hostages under fire. Israel has made it clear that the murder of hostages will lead to irreversible land loss in Gaza. Wow, when did Israel finally learn to speak in a language that Hamas can understand? Hamas currently has no way of bringing in weaponry via the Egyptian border. So while Hamas’ position seems weak, there is no one in the Gaza strip to challenge its rule. Can Israel “destroy” Hamas? Maybe they can kill many of the group’s members, but the basic ideas of Islamic supremacism and Jew-hatred are prevalent throughout the Palestinian population. That’s the reason I don’t know what the endgame will be. In days of yore, a conquering army did exactly that: it conquered land and bequeathed the same to its government. A hundred years ago, Israel would crush Gaza, push the population into one corner and develop the rest as a new part of Israel. But Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu has ruled out going back to Gaza. Sure, they might leave some military bases as needed, especially along the Egyptian border. But they will not be building new communities—and that is a mistake. After every war with the Palestinians, the game is reset to zero, like nothing happened. So another war is inevitable. Taking land and making it Jewish would be the one thing that Palestinian Arabs would understand as a concrete price for killing Jews: “Hey, that used to be my house over there; now it’s a synagogue." FAFO. Israel, unfortunately, does not have the will to follow through on such a strategy.
The fighting will continue. I don’t expect anything to come of the recent protests. Maybe there will be some more, but in the end, Hamas still holds a lot of the food and nearly all of the weapons. Hamas will fight the IDF with fewer men and resources. They will never come out with a white flag or sign an agreement that removes them from power and/or takes their weapons. The war will end in a whimper, without a formal agreement or ceasefire. Israel is building the institutional infrastructure to help Gazans go someplace else. No one will be forcibly removed, but anyone wanting to get out and try a new life of destroying some other country will be given the assistance to leave. If you opened a hole in the Egyptian border, a quarter million Gazans would get out before you could close it up.
While some see the recent protests against Hamas and even Al Jazeera as a good sign, I see it as the PA trying to once again make itself relevant. Mahmud Abbas is yearning to run Gaza, but Israel knows that the PA is no better than Hamas for policing weapons and fugitives. We are being treated to more Palestinian theater, like the supposed dead who keep moving when they film their propaganda videos. Hamas will not be toppled; on the other hand, it may just slink away.
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