Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance

by Tareq Baconi

Israel’s military approach in Lebanon produced what came to be known as the “Dahyieh doctrine,” a strategy that entailed the use of disproportionate force and heavy bombardment against civilian areas to maintain military deterrence.136 This policy referred to al-Dahyieh, a densely populated neighborhood in south Beirut where members of Hezbollah reside. Through extensive aerial shelling, Israel flattened whole swathes of south Beirut, resulting in devastating human and economic losses. By the end of the war, the Lebanese government reported more than 1,100 Lebanese citizens had been killed, thousands injured, and close to a million civilians internally displaced.

Hamas’s leaders looked to Israel and stressed that many political parties in the Knesset, including the mainstream Likud party, refused to recognize that Palestinians even existed as a people or to recognize the prospect of a Palestinian state.

The Mecca Agreement indicated Hamas’s willingness to abide, on a practical level, with the demands of the international community. Rather than acknowledging these concessions, Israel condemned the incoming cabinet.226 In particular, it denounced its commitment to the right of return through UN Resolution 194, a key demand for the Palestinians writ large—not just Hamas. This underscored Israel’s unwillingness to deal with certain political aspects that form the core of Palestinian nationalism, not of Hamas’s political agenda.

After the escalation of hostilities in January and in the context of this persistent chokehold, Hamas sent a suicide bomber into Israel on February 4. It was the first suicide mission since 2004, killing a seventy-three-year-old woman in the southern town of Dimona.110 Rocket fire also continued, resulting in the death of the first Israeli in nine months on February 27.111 This prompted Israel to unleash “Operation Hot Winter,” an expansive air and ground attack on Gaza that killed 110 Palestinians in five days.112 The European Union denounced Israel’s “disproportionate” response and policies of “collective punishment,” while analysts interpreted this operation to be a dry run for a future invasion.113 Hamas emerged relatively unscathed, boasting of victory as it maintained rocket fire.114 “Palestinians have emerged victorious from the five-day war waged by the Zionist occupation on the Gaza Strip.

“Enough is enough. The situation is going to change.”161 Less than five days after Zahhar’s renewed ceasefire offer, on December 27, Israel launched the first phase of “Operation Cast Lead,” an extensive aerial bombing campaign. The operation coincided with the American presidential transition, as President Barack Obama was set to assume office in January 2009, and also preceded Israeli elections. On the opening day of the operation, Israeli fighter planes flew over the Gaza Strip and dropped bombs on a graduation ceremony that Hamas was hosting for its civil police force, killing ninety-nine celebrants and graduates.162 Despite anticipating the attack, Hamas was caught off guard by the timing and scale of Israel’s offensive. Israel’s aerial assault was followed by a ground-air phase that lasted three weeks until January 18, 2009. During this time, Israel carried out extensive bombing campaigns with hundreds of air strikes throughout the Gaza Strip. Flying over the most densely populated centers of Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah, Israel targeted buildings, mosques, hospitals, and houses. Using the full range of its weaponry, Israel’s planes even dropped white phosphorus bombs, a chemical that causes severe burning and is outlawed by international law for use among civilian populations.163

From the year 2000 until Operation Cast Lead broke out, Israel had killed more than 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 634 children.169 Seen in this context, Cast Lead was a continuation of Israel’s use of sheer force to break Hamas, and in the process to circumvent all the political gestures that the movement had offered Israel. This was despite warnings from senior figures such as the previous head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, who insisted that Hamas had already indicated a willingness to compromise to achieve a two-state solution and was open to negotiations.170

The fighting took a significant toll. Palestinian sources estimated that by its twelfth day, 770 Palestinians had been killed and 2,500 wounded. Doctors and medical institutions in Gaza estimated that 40 percent of those killed were women and children and that deaths included entire families of noncombatants. On the Israeli side, four deaths were reported.181

Three weeks after Cast Lead began, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on January 16. An estimated 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians including an estimated 300 children, had been killed. Thirteen Israelis, four of whom were civilians, were also killed.

In the fall, the investigation launched by the UN Human Rights Council to look into the activities of Hamas and Israel during Operation Cast Lead was published, despite Israel’s adamant refusal to cooperate with the investigation. The findings were released in a report widely known as the Goldstone Report. It was named after the lead author, South African judge Richard Goldstone, an instrumental figure in undermining the apartheid regime in South Africa from the inside. The Goldstone Report found that Israel was guilty of war crimes during the Gaza offensive, including the deliberate targeting of civilians and institutions such as hospitals with lethal force. Hamas was also accused of war crimes for the indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel. Most revealingly, the report found no evidence that Hamas had deliberately fired rockets from civilian homes or stored weapons in mosques, claims that Israel had stridently upheld as the reason it invaded civilian areas so aggressively. Rather, the report identified instances where Israeli army officials used Palestinians as human shields during their ground invasion as they entered into urban spaces.227

For the movement, this “hysterical reaction” showed that Israel had successfully “turned the Abbas-Fayyad Authority into a tool in the occupier’s hand.”246 Addressing the “ferocious campaign,” one article proclaimed, “Could anyone have imagined the reactions of these forces following the murder of four Zionists, when they did not lift a finger at the murder of 1,300 Palestinian at the hands of the occupation in Gaza?”247

The agreement, which Hamas called “Operation Loyalty of the Free,” entailed the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held in captivity for close to five years, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.70 A hugely disproportionate agreement that underscored the power discrepancy between Israel and the Palestinians, Hamas nonetheless lauded this exchange as a historic success.

Less than three weeks after the agreement was declared, Israel launched “Operation Returning Echo,” on March 9, 2012, allegedly to preempt a major attack that was being planned from the Gaza Strip. This assault was the most violent since Cast Lead and lasted for close to a week, killing twenty-seven Palestinians, effectively ending the ceasefire that had been negotiated in 2009.100 Israel had reportedly been worried about weapon smuggling through the Sinai tunnels into the Gaza Strip and was seeking to reassert its dominance.101 But the timing of the attack raised suspicions that Israel was seeking to undermine the high-level decision taken by Abbas and Meshal to end the division. For the duration of 2011, rocket fire had been effectively controlled and Israel had not incurred casualties, compared to twenty-three civilians that had been killed in Gaza by Israeli incursions.102

In a leaked recording of a closed-door meeting, Secretary Kerry warned that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” if the US-sponsored peace process failed to produce a two-state reality.209

“Operation Protective Edge,” as it came to be known, entailed an aerial bombardment campaign followed by a ground invasion aimed at destroying Hamas’s network of tunnels, what Israel referred to as “terror tunnels.”18 Israel’s stated goal was to degrade the “terror organizations’ military infrastructure, and [. . . neutralize] their network of cross-border assault tunnels.”19 What followed was an expanded and more devastating repeat of what had taken place intermittently since 2006: a disproportionate and highly lethal military campaign aimed at forcing Hamas into another period of calm. As with past escalations, the assault was portrayed as necessary self-defense against Hamas’s consistent aggression, overlooking the movement’s effectiveness at restraining rocket fire from Gaza and the violence inherent in the act of the blockade itself.

By the end of Operation Protective Edge, 2,220 Palestinians had been killed, 1,492 of them civilians, 551 of them children, with several whole families obliterated. This was the highest level of civilian casualties Israel had inflicted on the Palestinians in any one year since 1967.72 From the Israeli side, deaths included sixty-six soldiers and five civilians, as well as one Thai national.

Rather than meeting its obligations under the 2012 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which necessitated easing the crossings into Gaza, Israel’s political leaders appeared willing to maintain the blockade while expecting calm to prevail in return. This one-sided and unsustainable expectation underscored another finding made by the Israeli state comptroller’s report, which was that Israel had no strategy for dealing with Gaza.78 Through Protective Edge, it became evident that Israel was willing to rely on reactive and overwhelming military power as the primary tool for responding to threats or perceived threats from Gaza.79

The fact that the word “terrorism” can accommodate both al-Qaeda and Hamas marks the scale of its imprecision and failure to communicate valuable information about political violence. While al-Qaeda is part of a transnational network that wages a global violent struggle against Western hegemony, Hamas adopts armed resistance on a localized front to end an occupation that is deemed illegal by international law.

For each of the three major operations of the last decade—Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, and Protective Edge—a clear pattern has emerged whereby Israeli provocations, often after Palestinian unity deals are signed, trigger opportunities for Israel to claim self-defense and launch spectacular attacks on Gaza. By preventing unity and containing Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel has effectively cultivated a fig leaf that legitimates its policies toward the strip.

The PLO believed, rightly, that ideological concessions would allow it to negotiate with Israel. It also imagined, mistakenly, that diplomacy would lead to Palestinian statehood. Hamas has learned this lesson and is unlikely to concede on any of its core ideological tenets without guarantees that such compromises would lead to the fulfillment of Palestinian rights.

As one leader explained, “Why should we be forced to explicitly recognize Israel if we’ve already indicated we have a de facto acceptance of its presence?”99 Hamas’s implicit acceptance of Israel has gone far beyond what many Israeli political parties, including the dominant ruling Likud party, have offered Palestinians within their charters.

Instead of deterrence, since 2007 Israel’s policy toward Hamas has taken the form of what Israel’s security establishment refers to as “mowing the lawn.”

Through Hamas’s effective containment in Gaza, Israel can forfeit the viability of any final resolution that would address Palestinian demands while blaming Hamas’s terrorism as the underlying cause of unrest. Hamas, for its part, can avoid making additional ideological concessions by arguing, rightfully, that Israel itself has failed to accept either the need to fulfill Palestinian rights or the legitimacy of the 1967 borders. Both Hamas and Israel will continue to focus on short-term survival in a longer-term battle, where political gains can be reaped from intermittent confrontations on the battlefield. This status quo allows Hamas to sustain its power and Israel to maintain its colonization of the West Bank and its stranglehold on the Gaza Strip, where the besieged Palestinians continue to pay the highest price of all.

The term “peace process” is fraught. It is arguably the case that the architecture of the process was designed to prevent rather than achieve peace. See Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit; and Christison, Perceptions of Palestine.