Can Hamas Be Tamed?

Michael Herzog

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary:  Optimists argue that Hamas' participation in mainstream Palestinian politics will spur the group to moderate its radical goals and terrorist tactics. But history shows that political participation co-opts militants only under very specific conditions -- and almost none of those exist in the Palestinian Authority today.

Michael Herzog is a Brigadier General in the Israel Defense Forces and a Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was formerly the senior military aide to Israel's Minister of Defense and the head of strategic planning for the IDF.

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

Much has happened in the decade between the first parliamentary elections for the Palestinian Authority (PA), in 1996, and the second, this year. The Oslo peace process staggered forward and then collapsed; a second Palestinian intifada raged and subsided; Israel erected a barrier fence along part of the West Bank and withdrew from Gaza; and Yasir Arafat, the founder and personification of Palestinian nationalism, passed from the scene. Meanwhile, Hamas -- the largest Islamist group in the Palestinian community -- continued its march into the political arena. Having boycotted the first elections, it campaigned vigorously in the second, and with its stunning victory in January, now stands poised to play a major role in Palestinian governance.

Hamas' involvement in the democratic process may strike many as a profound irony. After all, the group fields a private army, embraces violence as a political tool, regularly orchestrates terrorist attacks, and is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamist state ruling the territory of Israel and the PA. Granting Hamas legitimate political status and access to the prerogatives of state power seems to be asking for trouble.

A number of optimistic observers argue, however, that this concern is overblown. It is precisely the burdens and responsibilities that come with democratic politics, they claim, that will tame Hamas. After all, as the Carnegie Endowment's Marina Ottaway wrote last summer, "There is ample evidence that participation in an electoral process forces any party, regardless of ideology, to moderate its position if it wants to attract voters in large numbers." Once trapped in a normal political mode, these observers argue, Hamas will have to answer to a more diverse array of constituencies and either deliver practical results or risk being marginalized for failing to do so. Hamas will thus effectively be forced to sheathe its sword and behave. Instead of being concerned about Hamas' new role, the optimists contend, outsiders should actually welcome it as the most likely catalyst for moving the group's focus from radical rejectionism to mainstream politics.

The logic behind such a theoretical evolution is solid, and there are indeed examples of nondemocratic political actors making the journey to respectability through participation in routine democratic processes. The problem is that few of these examples have much in common with Hamas -- and those that do are much less encouraging. For all the confident assertions that everything will be fine, comparative analysis suggests skepticism is in order about whether the conditions are ripe for Hamas to be co-opted by its political participation or if instead Hamas will simply use political participation as another vehicle for pursuing its alarming core objectives. What the political inclusion of Hamas has really started, in other words, is a momentous experiment -- the results of which will have a major impact on the future of Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East at large.

FROM PARIAH TO PLAYER

Hamas was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood movement. It sought to address Palestinian nationalist aspirations and grievances from an Islamic perspective; its name, which means "strength," "bravery," and "zeal" in Arabic, is also an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement.

The group's ideology was set forth in its 1988 covenant, which remains operative to this day. The covenant defines Palestinian nationalism and the conflict with Israel in religious terms: the land of Palestine "from the river to the sea" is considered an Islamic waqf, an "endowment," and so no Muslim has the right to cede any part of it. The covenant explicitly calls for the obliteration of the state of Israel through the power of the sword and portrays the Jews as the source of all evil in the world. Freemasons, Rotarians, and members of organizations similar to theirs are denounced as Zionist agents, and they too are threatened with obliteration. The covenant stipulates that peace between Muslims, Christians, and Jews should only be permitted "under the wing of Islam."

Soon after its founding, Hamas became a major player in both Palestinian-Israeli relations and domestic Palestinian politics, pursuing a dual agenda through the parallel development of an operational and a social wing. The former now oversees hundreds of militants devoted to armed struggle against Israel and is in the process of building a backup militia of several thousand. It has been responsible for countless acts of terror -- from abductions and murders to suicide bombings and rocket attacks -- which have killed hundreds of Israelis, most of them civilians. The group's social arm (dawa), meanwhile, has developed a network of charities and religious, educational, and cultural institutions, positioning Hamas as an attractive provider of social services and an alternative to the hapless and corrupt PA.

Unlike, say, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Hamas does not have an explicit separation between its military and its political wing. All its branches answer to the same organizational authority, which makes the principal decisions on terror operations as well as on political, social, and other policies. Hamas does, however, recognize both an "internal" leadership, living inside the Palestinian territories, and an "external" one, living outside, primarily in Damascus. (The latter seems attuned less to the practical realities on the ground than to the radical environment in the region.)