As the ability of Israel and the PLO under Fatah’s leadership to reach a “grand bargain” has faltered during the last decade and one half, Hamas — a fighting nationalist Palestinian Islamic movement — has introduced a competing and arguably more successful dynamic into the Israeli-Palestinian strategic equation.
Hamas was overshadowed during the first years after the signing of the Oslo agreement and the return of the PLO to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1994, but its power has grown in tandem with the continuing failure of the PLO to chart a path to independence and the end of occupation. In contrast to the PLO's inability to establish a productive diplomatic momentum with Israel, Hamas haS compiled an impressive record of discreet understandings — not as ostentatious as the signed agreements that are the trademarks of the Oslo era, but still effective in establishing tangible rules that continue to define their growing relations.
Consequently, Hamas' rule in Gaza exhibits attributes of sovereignty that West Bank-based PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas can only dream about. Gaza's borders are defined. No permanently stationed Israeli troops or settlers are deployed in their midst. No Israeli checkpoints slice up the strip into manageable pieces. And for the first time n Palestine’s modern history a standing Palestinian army, far inferior to Israel’s to be sure, but an army nonetheless, fights and to some degree deters Israel.
Israel, in the words of Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's domestic intelligence service, is “upgrading Hamas and humiliating Abu Mazen.” The PLO leader despairs of the continuing diplomatic stalemate and Israel's seemingly insatiable appetite for settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. “I won't do anything as long as there are diplomatic negotiations, he says, “but if the stalemate continues … what's left for us to do?” Abu Mazen is one of many current leaders to warn PM Netanyahu to “sit in the chair here instead of me,take the keys, and you will be responsible for the Palestinian Authority.”
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