In Focus #32

Palestine Monitor

February 11, 2006

www.palestinemonitor.org/nueva_web/infos_materials/in_focus/in_focus_32.htm

Two weeks ago Palestinians elected the militant resistance group Hamas into legislative office. This week, the news reports are still the same: United States President George Bush is issuing conditions on the new Palestinian government, acting Prime Minster Ehud Olmert is vowing no contact with any body comprised of Hamas leaders, and all donor nations are threatening to cut off international aid. The terms have become more severe, but the Palestinian elections and the international response to them fall into the pattern of the peace process that has repeated itself since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993.

In that year Yasser Arafat shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin on the While House Lawn and peace became a well-photographed reality on the level of high politics. But Israel’s aggressive institutionalization of violence and Palestinian complicity within the lopsided international arena have removed any legitimacy from the process of the 1990s. Indeed, the process completely broke down in 2000, and the narrative of ‘no Palestinian partner for peace’ has kept it broken to this day. Since then, the United States stood silent at Ariel Sharon’s reinvasion of the West Bank in 2002, the world applauded Israel’s unilateral actions even though it signaled the breakdown of negotiations, and construction of the separation wall continues despite the clarity of international law in prohibiting it.

And yet the world references a ‘peace process’ as if one still exists. The picture of the handshake remains our picture of peace—failed, yet repeated over and over again.

Today, fifteen years of international brokerage has removed all peace from any process and provided the reality with which we now deal: Israel has free reign to create the realities of the conflict, and the international powerbrokers take no stake in altering the status quo. Palestinian self-determination, presumably a key goal of the process, does not play a part in the process itself.

The elections of January 25 were the assertion of Palestinian self-determination on two levels. Palestinians voted, and in doing sped up the process of moving their society away from its one-party government to one inclusive of its people; they exercised their self-determination at the local level. The officials Palestinians voted into office, though, assert Palestinian autonomy on another level altogether. In electing Hamas, Palestinians are rebelling against the international discourse of peace that excludes them. This election is asserting their self-determination to the international sphere.

Peace Rehearsals

The international rubric of peace has two defining characteristics. First, it is headed by the United States, whose mediating role has been particularly compromised by its special relationship with Israel. Israel is the top recipient of US aid in the world, receiving an average of $3 billion a year, and could not maintain its occupation of Palestinian territories without this monetary assistance. US-manufactured tanks, guns, and aircrafts seal in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but the United States continues to lead outcomes at the bargaining table.

Second, because the international community does not have the political will to hold Israel responsible for its actions, it frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a battle between two equally maligned parties. Such a framework correctly recognizes that both parties harbor their own particular needs, but in assuming equal needs, the framework leaves out the unequal power dynamics. Practically speaking, this focuses on the effects of the conflict—its cycle of violence—rather than its cause—institutionalized incitement on the side of Israel, in the form of its forty-year illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.

International powerbrokers constantly deny the unequal power relations in the negotiating process and downplay the mechanisms of the occupation to the extent that the world does not know what it actually entails. Home demolitions, the denial of Palestinians to build on land that they personally own, the destruction of vital agriculture, the confiscation of rare water resources, the denial of medical treatment to a huge population and the deprival of freedom of movement are rarely acknowledged as the principle apparatus keeping Palestinian society controlled and suffocated on a daily-basis.

By balancing Israel and Palestine on the seesaw of international mediation while systemically favoring Israel, the international approach to peacemaking has itself further offset the already imbalanced situation. From the Madrid talks in 1991 to the road map, Israel has been painted as the victim which needs to live in peace and security, the key to which is the end of Palestinian terror. This Israeli ‘security first’ argument means demanding reforms of Palestinians while granting no parallel priority to their security, and moreover, disarming Palestinians of all bargaining abilities. Giving up all resistance and accepting an Israeli right to occupation became a precondition for negotiations. With nothing to give up, Palestinians could not negotiate and so merely accepted and managed demands from the more powerful party, Israel.

As a result, the peace process is no longer a process, but a rehearsed exercise where Palestinians are forced to jump through hoops in preparation for the final performance of peace, which is itself postponed further and further into the future while the hoops are raised higher and higher. The approach to peace has become unfeasible for any Palestinian government to engage in, and a humiliating process for Palestinians to watch unfold.

Enter Hamas

As the peace process won Palestinians no respite from Israeli oppression, it also transformed the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a lame duck sitting on the murky waters of failure, ready to be shot down by Palestinian public opinion. As Palestinians were increasingly tired of standing idle while the ship of self-determination sank and their economy stagnated under occupation and corruption, they took out their frustrations on the PA’s ruling party Fateh.

Hamas, on the other hand, was never a part of the international charade of a peace process and so remained untainted by it. In the meantime Hamas stepped-in to fill the social and economic structural gap by building and financing schools, day-care facilities, housing projects and prisoner support programs. They basically performed the services that the government itself could not deliver to the unemployed and largely disenfranchised poor of Gaza.

It is this track-record that Palestinians voted for. They saw Hamas as a group that prioritized Palestinian needs above an international process that proved itself counter to those needs. However, this does not mean Palestinians reject peace altogether.

A Ramallah-based polling group, Near East Consulting, conducted a survey of voter opinion four days after the elections. It found that 84% of 1,200 randomly selected voters support a peace agreement with Israel, and of those who voted for Hamas, 77% said they also want such agreement. Palestinians want to live peacefully with Israel, but voted overwhelmingly for a resistance movement whose constitution does not recognize its existence.

This apparent contradiction makes sense when placed back into the discourse of international peace. Palestinians want peace with Israel, but have lived through enough past failures to know that a just resolution cannot come through the current system. The entrance of Hamas changes this, because unlike Fateh, Hamas has something to offer: the recognition of Israel and renunciation of violence inside Israeli borders. In return for this, Hamas demands the end of military occupation and the establishment of 1967 borders. In electing Hamas, then, Palestinians are playing political hardball. They are not rejecting peace; they are rejecting the failed rehearsal of peace.

The reluctance by the international community to see this as a positive sign perhaps reveals an altogether alternative plan. Hamas does not fit into the mold of conciliatory peace crafted by Israel and international peace-brokers. For breaking the mold and so revealing that peace is not a process but a pre-determined outcome on Israel’s terms, Hamas will be made into the newest scapegoat for the breakdown of ‘peace.’

The New Hope?

In this way, the international treatment of the question of Palestine—that is, Palestinians’ will to achieve collective self-determination that the world recognizes—is intimately tied to Palestinian self-governance. Palestine does not have the privilege of separating its domestic concerns from its international ones, because it is the international arena that dictates the Palestinian ability to act locally.

By placing importance on Palestine’s social needs rather than compromising in the international realm, Hamas breaks the mold. It represents an escape from the local and international failures of the past decades. In doing so, it brings back the hope of self-determination.

This hope is reflected in the practical level in Hamas’ interaction with Israel. Israel’s obsession with its own security first, means that Hamas’ violence is the only thing that can make Israel sit down at the negotiating table.

The tragedy is that Palestinians should not have to resort to violence, or the threat of it, in order to engage Israel in a process of negotiation. Palestinians have been non-violently making the same demands that Hamas makes now—a return to the 1967 borders, the status of Jerusalem and the reopening of the refugee question—but Israel and the world has paid no attention.

Hamas’ terms are not the ones on which the US and Israel wanted to base reconciliation, but they are also not the unjustifiable demands the US and Israel make them out to be. Hamas is simply calling the peace process industry what it is—an imbalanced system that favors Israeli power and the Israeli depiction of events.

Hopefully, Palestine’s exercise in self-determination will bring it more than internal stability. If other donors step in with help, a Hamas government can work out a truce that places a just peace closer than it has ever been. In the end though, this is what democracy looks like, and it’s a level above the ballot boxes. Palestinians, formerly disenfranchised from the peace process industry are speaking truth to power and refusing to allow that power to force retreat.