By David Hearst* – Middle East Eye
The scale of the suffering that Israel has inflicted on all Palestinians within its reach has meant that Hamas’ fate is Palestine’s too
Call Gaza what you will: killing fields, an endless loop of blood, pain and death, the world’s largest concentration camp. Or, as the population of Israel appears to be intent on doing, you can ignore it altogether.
The Ashkenazi Jews of Tel Aviv live in a western bubble, sipping their morning cappuccinos and fretting about their yoga teachers just one hour’s drive away from the most appalling scenes the world has witnessed since Srebrenica, or Rwanda.
But there is one thing none of them seem to understand: Hamas won’t surrender.
To think that its leaders in Gaza will take the money and run, as Fatah once did, is to reveal, after 18 months of total warfare and two months of starvation, how little Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands his enemy.
Make no mistake, the last Israeli “offer” would have amounted to an act of surrender. It was to surrender all the hostages in exchange for 45 days of food and water, and to seek the disarmament of Hamas.
Hamas replied that it is prepared to release all the hostages in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners and offer a long-term hudna, or truce, in which it would not redo its tunnels or develop its weapons, and cede the governance of Gaza to other Palestinian factions.
But it has not budged from the two conditions that it set at the start of this war: it will not disarm and it wants the total withdrawal of Israeli forces from the strip and a complete and final end to the war.
Netanyahu, the saboteur
It has become abundantly and repeatedly clear that the impasse to securing a negotiated settlement lies with Netanyahu himself. On two occasions, he has signed deals with Hamas only to break them unilaterally himself.
On the last occasion in January, he agreed to a phased ceasefire, which secured the release of 33 hostages, in which Israel was supposed to begin negotiations on a second phase and a permanent ceasefire.
Netanyahu simply tore that agreement up. US President Donald Trump let him do that, even though this was the piece of paper that the new president himself had claimed credit for.
By common consent, Netanyahu only went back to war to save his coalition from impending defeat in a vote on the budget. Any military objectives have long since been exhausted.
Gaza has not only been under total blockade for two months, but Israel has been bombing the warehouses in which the remaining food is kept. Starvation has clearly and indubitably become a weapon of negotiation, however, that is not working either.
Trump’s former hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, was having the same experience with Netanyahu as Biden’s envoys had. Hamas came close to an independent agreement with the US over hostage exchanges in direct negotiations, until Netanyahu caught wind of them and leaked them to the media.
Boehler himself told Al Jazeera that Israel’s war on Gaza would “end immediately” if all the captives were to be released. Hamas would agree to that. But it’s over Netanyahu’s dead body.
The situation has not changed since Biden’s CIA director, Bill Burns, oversaw a negotiated end to the war a year ago, which Hamas signed, only for Netanyahu to pull out.
No surrender
There are many reasons why Hamas will not surrender to the nightly punishment it and the people of Gaza are taking. Over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire broke down in March.
Hamas had its first rank of leadership, its civilian government, its police and almost every hospital wiped out. Rafah is being demolished. And yet, it continues to resist substantial offers of money to go into exile.
Late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would have gone into exile long ago, as he did after the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) forces were surrounded in West Beirut in 1982. Fatah would have flown abroad by now.
But neither of these precedents apply to Hamas. Why?
First and foremost, if the collapse of the Israeli army and the atrocities carried out in southern Israel on 7 October changed Israel forever, so too has the decimation of Gaza changed the Palestinian cause forever.
Gaza has become sacred turf for the Palestinians everywhere.
There is not a family in Gaza that has not lost relatives or their homes in this war.
Neither Hamas nor any of the other resistance groups can be separated from the people they are fighting for. As the collective suffering increases, so does the collective will to stay on their land, as the unarmed farmers of south Hebron have shown.
Furthermore, there is no more persuasive proponent of the imperative to resist occupation than the behaviour of the Israeli state itself. This is an amorphous, persistent and toxic invader of other people’s space.
‘Finishing the job’
Israel can never have enough land, nor enough control. It always seeks more. It can never stop making its religion dominate all other religions in this space. At Easter time, Christians are as much victims of these acts of supremacy as Muslims are.
Its settler movement is even more active during times of peace than in times of war, as the history of settlement in the occupied West Bank after the Oslo Accords demonstrates.
Israel can not abide by a two-state solution because there was only ever one state in the minds of its creators and their descendants. Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Netanyahu are collectively only “finishing the job” of eradicating Palestinians from the “Land of Israel” that David Ben Gurion started and then stopped.
It is a recurrent and convenient myth, fed by liberal Zionists, to separate the various tribes of Israel on the Palestinian issue, because no meaningful differences exist. This is truer today than it was at the time of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.
It is no coincidence that at the very time there is a surge of Jews praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque – more than 6,000 Jews entered the courtyards to pray since the Passover holiday began on Saturday, more than all the Jewish worshippers that visited during holidays last year – the Israeli Supreme Court voted unanimously to dismiss a petition filed by several human rights organisations demanding the resumption of the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The state of Israel in all its forms, religious and secular, is pursuing the same goal, even while these tribes are at war with each other on many other issues.
Hamas’ surrender, and with it Gaza, would today be tantamount to the surrender of the Palestinian cause itself. Not because all Palestinians are religious, or Fatah is that unpopular, but because the resistance represents the only route left to end the occupation.
The scale of the suffering that Israel has inflicted on all Palestinians within its reach, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and in Israel alike, has meant that Hamas’ fate is Palestine’s too.
But Hamas differs from Fatah in that it is a religious organisation. It started this war over the incursions of Jewish settlers into Al-Aqsa Mosque. And Palestinians in Gaza have turned to their religion to make sense of the butchery they have been subjected to.
Strategic objective
It is Hamas’ collective discipline and faith that has stopped it becoming corrupt. This affects everyone.
Rifaat Radwan, the 23-year-old paramedic whose dying words were captured on his phone, begged Allah to forgive him for not having prayed regularly five times a day. He was not that observant and evidently not a member of Hamas, but he was religious enough to beg forgiveness in his dying moments.
If ever there was a symbol of the bravery and sacrifice Palestinians in Gaza are making in the face of incredible and crushing odds, Radwan was it. On his deathbed, his belief in a divine leader would not be crushed. Nor will Gaza’s.
There are other less existential reasons why Hamas will not give up.
Whatever fate awaits it as an organisation – and let’s face it, insurgencies like the Tamil Tigers or the Chechen rebels have been crushed by overwhelming force, while others like ETA have withered without achieving their chief objectives – Hamas already believes it has achieved its strategic objective.
That was to propel the Palestinian pursuit of self-determination in a state of their own back up to the top of the world’s human rights agenda.
During the past three years, the US public’s views of Israel have turned negative, according to Pew Research. More than half of adults in the US – 53 percent – express an unfavourable opinion of Israel, an increase of nine percentage points from before 7 October.
Hamas is winning the war of public opinion, and Israel is losing it, especially in countries where the group is a proscribed organisation. The law is telling people to think of Hamas as terrorists, but they are increasingly disinclined to do so, even though they think 7 October was an act of evil.
If Israel wants to finish this conflict for good by force, it can be assured the same objective is seared into the consciousness of every Palestinian too. The longer Netanyahu continues his doomed campaign in Gaza, the closer major European countries like France will come to recognising a Palestinian state.
Complex negotiations
Trump’s envoys are currently pursuing three sets of complex negotiations simultaneously and they are learning the hard way how intractable each is.
Gaza is only one of three and Trump wants quick returns. He does not have the patience to pursue any for any length of time. Furthermore, two of the conflicts are deeply interconnected.
The same countries that are forbidding the US its airspace in the event of an attack on Iran are also resisting a mass population transfer out of Gaza, and Israel and Egypt are in a state of open hostility about Sinai, with each accusing the other of violating the terms of the Camp David Accord.
If Trump’s negotiations with Iran falter, Netanyahu will renew his pressure to bomb its nuclear sites, with no solution being found for Gaza. Decision time for Netanyahu, the pragmatist, is coming and he will not have as many cards as he currently thinks he has to play.
For military powers as large as America and Nato, the Taliban proved too much. So too did the resistance in Iraq.
For a country as small and as dependent on the US as Israel is, a forever war in Gaza is even less sustainable. It would be wise for Israel to cut its losses now and pull out of Gaza before it loses on the world stage even more.
Once the aura of invincibility is smashed as it was on 7 October, it is gone for good.
*David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.