Hamas and the postponed meeting, Monday, October 10, 2005

Updated at 22:00

Despite his newfound reputation as a peacemaker, Sharon is in no hurry to provide the Palestinians with the kind of goodwill gestures that they say they desperately need: checkpoints lifted, prisoners released, West Bank towns handed over to PA security forces, and a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians also reportedly want Israel to declare a ceasefire against armed irregulars, meaning an end to the nighttime manhunts for wanted men (and occasional women) for past terror attacks or suspected plotters of new terror attacks.

At most, Sharon is ready to revive bilateral committees formed in the wake of the Sharm el Sheikh summit where the two men met in an atmosphere of optimism and hope. The Palestinians have no objections to the revival of those committees, which were suspended by Israel after an initial round of prisoner releases and some towns handed over to the PA security forces were followed by some terror incidents inside Israel.

But the possibility that a Sharon-Abbas summit might be delayed until some time in November does not mean that the security dialogue – and even political dialogue -- between the two sides, which intensified during the disengagement from Gaza, will be suspended. The committees, which cover issues like prisoner releases, checkpoint issues, and other matters that Israel regards as security problems and the Palestinians regard as political issues, are resuming their activities.

It is not clear who decided – if such a decision has been made – that the meeting won't take place tomorrow. Sharon has said there's no point in a meeting if it is not properly prepared. Abbas has said there's no point to a meeting if he can't bring something concrete home from it, for example, aging, ailing Palestinian prisoners who were jailed before the Oslo agreements and have openly expressed support for the peace process, yet because they have 'blood on their hands' – a catchall Israeli phrase for any Palestinian convicted of a heinous crime involving deaths of Israelis – Jerusalem is reluctant to release.

The real problem between the two sides was and remains the Hamas, or more precisely, what the Palestinians are doing about the Hamas, or even more precisely, what Israel is doing about Hamas, meaning the ongoing nighttime raids, which are continuing to result in arrests and deaths as a result of resisting arrest.

Abbas is under mounting pressure from Israel, the U.S., the Egyptians and from inside Fateh to postpone the scheduled January 2006 elections for a new Palestinian Legislative Council, for fear that Hamas will capture enough seats in the newly constituted PLC to dominate Palestinian politics and possibly even win the government.

Abbas has already postponed the PLC elections once before, raising tensions with Hamas that has not subsided. His reasoning to the Israelis about the need for goodwill gestures is based on his need to prove to his public that his non-military approach to dealing with Israel is more effective, let alone moral, than the irregulars' methods – suicide bombings, drive by highway shootings, landmines, or simply knifings.

Furthermore, in recent weeks, Abbas' police forces have been moving to assert their authority against both criminals and Hamas and Islamic Jihad violations of displays of weapons, for example. Those steps are increasingly popular in Palestinian public opinion, but when the PA says it needs more arms and ammo to confront the criminal elements, the Israeli response from Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is– if they need weapons, let them confiscate them from Hamas. Yet the Shin Bet and IDF both agree that the PA security forces need more arms to do the job of enforcing the PA's authority.

Hamas popularity meanwhile is not at all as uniform as it is often depicted in the western press. True, in poverty-stricken Gaza, Hamas charities are much more effective at providing social services than often corrupt Palestinian Authority officials. But in the much wealthier West Bank, where secularism is as much an ideology among Palestinian nationalists as Islamic fundamentalism, the Hamas methods and goals – a Waqf-run state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River (and perhaps beyond into Jordan) – are anathema to the vast majority of Palestinians.

Furthermore, Hamas has been discrediting itself left and right ever since the Israelis quit Gaza. First, Hamas men carried bombs to a 'victory rally' in the Jabalya refugee camp and when the bombs accidentally went off, killing at least 21 Palestinians, the Hamas automatically blamed Israel and fired dozens of Qassams into the Western Negev, sparking a harsh Israeli response that dampened a lot of the optimism that had finally begun to emerge in Gaza. Then the Hamas and Fateh began to openly fight in the streets of Gaza, with the clashes spilling over into the West Bank. Bystanders as well as combatants were killed.

In Palestinian society, the armed struggle may have an important place in the narrative of nation building, but like Israelis, they are very worried about civil war and with Sharon, of all people, giving up Gaza, the optimism for 'a period of construction,' as Abbas calls it, is very much the mood desired by the Palestinian street. And the more Hamas threatens, waves its weapons, and promises unending war against the Zionists, it apparently alienates as many Palestinians as it wins over.

Furthermore, Fateh may not be as unappealing as it is often depicted. It is going through an unprecedented 'primaries' campaign, to come up with their list of candidates for the national-level seats in the new PLC: that campaign is presumably going to result in many of the old, ostensibly corrupt politicians from Fateh being replaced by younger men and women whose political strength is derived from their local reputations rather than their proximity in the past to Yasser Arafat or the PLO power structure in Tunis.

Even if a slated meeting between Sharon and Abbas is postponed until 'after the holidays,' Israel Radio predicted this morning, the IDF was ordering some 'goodwill gestures for Ramadan,' allowing a few hundred or even a few thousand West Bankers to reach the Haram el Sharif (Temple Mount) prayers on Fridays and a few thousands to work picking olives inside Israel.

That is far from the help that Mahmoud Abbas needs to accelerate his state-building efforts meant to put an end to the legacy of corruption and incompetence left behind by the father of the Palestinian nation, Yasser Arafat. Furthermore, there is always something temporary about such holiday abatements, because the 'political process' – the preferred term nowadays for what was once more optimistically called the 'peace process' is a hostage in the hands of any teenager with a gun on the Palestinian side, or for that matter, any local IDF commander more gung-ho than necessary.

It is also possible that all the sudden talk about postponing the Sharon-Abbas meeting is a negotiating tactic between the naturally tight-fisted farmer, Sharon, and Abbas' insistence that the only way to 'domesticate' Hamas properly is through the electoral process, which requires him demonstrating political gains for the PA to prove to the Palestinian public that Hamas does not deserve the popularity it enjoys. The Palestinians at noon were said to be hoping that David Welch, the top U.S. diplomat for the Israeli-Palestinian case, in Ramallah today, could help break the deadlock in the discussion of the preparations for the summit. According to an Israel Radio report, the Palestinians are saying that they have a list of only 20 prisoners they want released right now as a goodwill gesture. Maybe they blinked first. We'll see.

But by 22:00 the postponement was old news. An Israeli-American -- with a knitted kippa and a flowing white beard -- was a cowinner of the Nobel Economics Prize. Game theorist Robert 'Yisrael' Aumann of the Hebrew University is considered the leading games theorist and won with Thomas C. Schelling, of the University of Maryland.

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