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.

Many established democracies have also set up legislative roadblocks to help contain the political havoc that radical parties can wreak. In the wake of World War II, for example, a number of European countries barred outright certain types of parties to prevent a resurgence of fascism. In 1948, the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, forcibly crushed partisan armed movements in order to prevent them from poisoning the new Israeli democracy, and the Israeli legislature later excluded violent extremists. And in 1984, then President Chaim Herzog (my late father), refused to meet with Meir Kahane, the leader of the ultranationalist Kach Party, even though Kahane had been elected to parliament -- a stance that helped expand the legislative requirements of acceptability in Israel to include the rejection of racism and the endorsement of democracy.

Time is critical, finally, because ingrained habits of political moderation tend to be learned not in a day, but only through sustained experience over several years and several electoral cycles. It took several decades, for example, for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to renounce violence. And in Ireland, it took a full seven years after the 1998 Good Friday agreement for the IRA to actually decommission its arms.

Unfortunately, if one looks closely at the case of Hamas, hardly any of these potentially moderating factors are present. Elections in the PA may be relatively free. But Palestinian political, security, and other institutions are a chaotic mess, and the pragmatic political center, represented by Fatah, is in complete disarray. Hamas is launching its political career in the legislative and executive branches without having disarmed and is quite possibly stronger than the rest of the state apparatus. Despite Abbas' occasional promises that he will force Hamas to disarm, no domestic player will be able to check the group's extremist tendencies, nor will any rules or safeguards be in place to proscribe unacceptable behavior.

In fact, all past Palestinian thresholds for political participation have been lifted. The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip introduced just such a threshold, with Hamas in mind. In Annex II, Article III(2), it disqualified from Palestinian elections "any candidates, parties or coalitions ... [that] commit or advocate racism or pursue the implementation of their aims by unlawful or nondemocratic means." Yet the Palestinian election law for the 2006 elections, enacted in June 2005, contains no substantive rules by which candidates or parties have to abide.

The ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, meanwhile, adds fuel to the fire of domestic Palestinian turmoil and to extremism. It provides an excuse for tolerating private armies within the PA and enhances the legitimacy of Hamas' rejectionist stance. Opinion polls show that although most Palestinians disagree with Hamas' ideological extremism and support a two-state solution to the conflict, they also accept the notion of "armed struggle" as a legitimate route to get there, citing the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as an example of what such pressure can achieve. This complicated preference structure gives Hamas a perverse incentive to disrupt progress in diplomatic negotiations, since the normalization of Palestinian-Israeli relations could well lessen Hamas' appeal. As long as its military and political power enhance each other, Hamas will be able to fend off pressures to disarm and will derail progress toward peace. Given the urgency of moving the conflict toward resolution, finally, there simply is no time to let Palestinian domestic politics play out long enough for Hamas' political socialization to occur.

HEIR CONDITIONING

It is too late to prevent an unreconstructed Hamas from participating in Palestinian politics. It is not too late, however, to avoid compounding that mistake by giving the group a continued free ride and full legitimacy regardless of its behavior from now on. The Palestinians, with the help of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the international community, should now try hard to create the conditions under which Hamas may liberalize, in the hope that one day the optimists might be proved right. This, obviously, is a long-term project.

With Hamas controlling Palestinian politics and national institutions, the immediate onus has shifted to outside players to create real incentives for Hamas to abandon its militancy and real disincentives to preserve it. The international community was poised to invest a tremendous amount of political and financial capital in promoting domestic Palestinian reform. Those investments should now be provided only if they can be used to equip moderates to compete more effectively with Hamas in both the security and social spheres. Aid should also be designed to create a pragmatic Palestinian political center by revamping Fatah and encouraging reform-minded activists and parties.

Outside actors should also try to use their influence to create the proper incentives and disincentives for Hamas' future behavior. The fact that so many Palestinians regard the group as entirely legitimate does not mean that all other interested parties have to agree. The international community should therefore clearly assert that in its eyes, democratic participation will confer legitimacy on Hamas only so long as the group renounces violence, disarms, and recognizes Israel's right to exist. Political engagement with Hamas and the removal of it from international terrorist lists should be made contingent on real progress in these areas, not simply on the group's willingness to enter the political field.

Ideally, Israeli-Palestinian relations would need to improve in tandem with conditions in the PA, so as to create a virtuous cycle that can help drive both the peace process and the Palestinian reform process forward. Because of the nature of Hamas and the threat of terrorism, final-status negotiations now seem as remote as ever. The transition of political leadership in Israel together with Hamas' newfound prominence will make extensive bilateral talks of any kind unlikely in the near term. The specter of a weak, dysfunctional PA coupled with a strong, violent Hamas is likely to deepen Israelis' inclination toward unilateralism in their relations with the Palestinians.