Hamas' Growing Influence in the Palestinian Territories
Video Transcript:
Video Transcript:
The past week has seen a flurry of meetings revolving around Israel, Hamas and Egypt. An Israeli military delegation traveled to Cairo on Feb. 14. Prior to that, Hamas met with Egyptian officials and later acknowledged that Egypt was serving as a mediator in indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas. On Feb. 20, a U.S. military delegation arrived in Cairo for a three-day visit. Finally, an Egyptian delegation is supposed to be heading to Israel in the near future.
There are a number of issues on the table, all of which center on maintaining a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel since the Gaza conflict late last year. When the cease-fire was struck in late November, the immediate aim was to halt the launching of long-range rockets from Gaza into Israel and thus forego the need for an Israeli ground offensive into Gaza. A number of unresolved issues remain.
Hamas wants to capitalize on these negotiations to boost the organization’s political standing in the region and with the West. This entails the United States and Israel acknowledging Hamas as a legitimate political entity and opening up border crossings into Gaza to end the territory’s political and economic isolation. Israel is reluctantly acknowledging that Hamas cannot be avoided as a negotiating partner. While Hamas carries substantial popular support in Gaza, has a strong relationship with regional players like Turkey and Qatar, and is emboldened by the regional ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood, its secular rivals in Fatah running the West Bank are struggling to avoid becoming politically obsolete.
Israel is facing two big problems. The first is that Israel wants assurances that Egypt, as the mediator of these negotiations and thus the security guarantor of Gaza, has the political will and means to prevent Hamas from boosting its military capabilities. Second, even as Hamas refuses to relinquish its militant portfolio, Israel doesn't want to give Hamas a boost in political legitimacy by allowing, for instance, a freer flow of commercial goods into Gaza, without a strong enough check on Hamas’ influence.
Egypt bears most of the responsibility for the first problem. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will rely on its close political and ideological relationship with Hamas to manage Gaza, but it has to show Israel and the United States that it will apply military force when necessary to avoid giving Israel a reason to take pre-emptive action and at the same time maintain vital aid flows from the United States. Last week, Egyptian border security forces flooded a network of tunnels between the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza. This was done a number of times before by the Mubarak regime as well to hamper large-scale smuggling into Gaza. Now, Hamas delivered the obligatory condemnation to these actions, but it’s unlikely that Hamas was taken completely by surprise when it’s already deep in negotiations with Egypt. Hamas is now expecting Egypt to follow through with promises to have Israel lift a blockade on its border crossings.
Israel has announced that it will allow construction materials to enter Gaza, but it's unlikely to fully lift the blockade and put its full trust in Egypt to control traffic in and out of the territory. Israel also faces a lack of options to balance against Hamas. Hamas has made no secret of its agenda to spread its influence to the West Bank, and is using a possible reconciliation with Fatah to facilitate that access. Israel is greatly unnerved by this prospect and has no interest in seeing Hamas and Fatah politically unite with Hamas in the dominant position. Israel prefers a stronger Fatah to keep Hamas in check in two geographically segregated territories. Israel’s recent arrests against Hamas members in the West Bank and its repeated insistence to Egypt to forgo the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation talks speak to this goal.
Though these negotiations will likely fall short of both Israel and Hamas’s expectations, the negotiations themselves reveal Hamas’ elevated political role in the territories, a steadily declining role for Fatah and a much more complicated relationship between Israel and a Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt.
