What was Hamas thinking? For over three 

decades, it has had the same brutal idea of victory

 
In the three and a half decades since it began as an underground militant group, Hamas has pursued a consistently violent strategy aimed at rolling back Israeli rule. Despite bringing enormous suffering to both sides of the conflict, it has made steady progress.

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FROM UPSTART INSURGENCE TO PROTO-STATE

From its establishment in the late 1980s, on the eve of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Hamas has been committed to armed struggle and the destruction of Israel. At the height of the peace process in the 1990s, it launched scores of suicide bombings and other attacks that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. The violence only intensified with the breakdown in peace talks and the far deadlier second Palestinian uprising in 2000. 

Hamas attacks were met with massive Israeli military incursions into the occupied West Bank and Gaza that exacted a far heavier death toll on Palestinians. But as the violence wound down in 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and some 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza, while maintaining tight control over access to the enclave by land, air and sea.

Hamas claimed the withdrawal as vindication for its approach, and the following year it won a landslide victory in Palestinian elections. In 2007, after bitter infighting, it violently seized Gaza from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority.

Over the next 16 years, through four wars and countless smaller battles with Israel that rained devastation upon Gaza, Hamas only grew more powerful. Each time it had more rockets that traveled farther. Each time its top leaders survived, securing a cease-fire and the gradual easing of a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. In the meantime, it built a government — including a police force, ministries and border terminals with metal detectors and passport control.

And what of the thousands of Palestinians killed, the flattened apartment blocks, the crumbling infrastructure, the suffocating travel restrictions...?

Hamas blamed Israel, as did many Palestinians. The Hamas government has seen only sporadic protests over the years and has quickly and violently suppressed them.

 

NEGOTIATIONS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

If Hamas’ armed struggle against Israel looks like a failure — or much worse — consider the alternative.

The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank recognized Israel and renounced armed struggle over three decades ago, hoping it would lead to a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, territories seized by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war.

But the talks repeatedly broke down, partly because of Hamas’ violence but also because of Israel’s relentless expansion of settlements, now home to more than a half million Israelis. There have been no serious peace talks in well over a decade, and the Palestinian Authority has become little more than an administrative body in the 40% of the occupied West Bank where it is allowed to operate.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, an 87-year-old moderate, has been powerless to stop settlement expansion, settler violence, home demolitions or the unraveling of longstanding arrangements around a sensitive Jerusalem holy site. He has been sidelined during every Gaza war — including this one — and the Palestinian Authority is widely seen as a corrupt accomplice to the occupation.

“Palestinians have tried everything from elections to boycotts to the (International Criminal Court) to engaging in a supposed peace process,” said Mustafa, of the Crisis Group. “You’ve had one of the most conciliatory leaderships in the entire history of the Palestinian national movement, and that still hasn’t been enough.”

Still, the scale of last weekend’s attack takes Hamas’ approach into uncharted territory.

“Despite conducting attacks against civilians in the past and fighting previous wars against Israel, (Hamas) did also simultaneously engage in political tracks,” including negotiations with Abbas’ Fatah movement and even tacit coordination with Israel...

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Israel has faced virtually no calls for restraint in the wake of the Hamas attack, but that could change if the war drags on.

In the end, the two sides could find themselves returning to the status quo: An internationally mediated truce, with Hamas ruling over a devastated and aid-dependent Gaza, and Israel redoubling security along its frontier.

That too, for Hamas at least, would look like a victory.

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Well, whatever Israel wants. I don't give advice to adults.