Earlier this month, Hamas elected Ismail Haniyeh as its new overall leader, replacing Khaled Meshaal, who had completed the maximum two terms in office, and who had headed Hamas since Israel’s assassination of his predecessor Abdel Aziz Rantisi in 2004.
Coming days after the organisation published a policy document that was seen as an attempt to soften its image, media reports have suggested accordingly that Haniyeh is expected to usher in a more pragmatic direction for Hamas. However, the implication that this will herald a shift from Meshaal’s leadership is misguided.
The significant difference in leadership style is not between Haniyeh and Meshaal – both relative pragmatists – but between them and Hamas’s co-founders Rantisi and the late Ahmed Yassin, who were more hard-line.
A marked difference is that Meshaal and Haniyeh have both expressed Hamas’ acceptance of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Rantisi and Yassin called for the liberation of all of historic Palestine, in line with Hamas’s charter.
In 2008, former US president Jimmy Carter met with Meshaal and reached an agreement that Hamas would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders as long as such a state was ratified by the Palestinian people in a referendum.
In 2010, Haniyeh, addressing a rare news conference in Hamas-ruled Gaza, said: “We accept a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital, the release of Palestinian prisoners, and the resolution of the issue of refugees. Hamas will respect the results [of a referendum] regardless of whether it differs from its ideology and principles.” This from Hamas’s Gaza leader at the time.
The significance of this concession by Meshaal and then Haniyeh, contradicting Hamas’s own charter, has been conveniently overlooked by Israel and its allies.
But such a shift should not be particularly surprising; it should be seen not as a fundamental difference of opinion by Hamas’s current and former leaders vis-à-vis their two predecessors, but as an acknowledgement of the changing realities on the ground, domestically and regionally.
These realities have evolved continuously since the organisation’s founding during the first Palestinian intifada in the 1980s. Indeed, the status quo during Yassin’s and Rantisi’s leadership was a world away from that of Meshaal’s and now Haniyeh’s. Each is a product of their time, and in such a troubled and volatile environment, Hamas has had to adapt to survive, let alone progress.
It was easier for the co-founders to be more hard-line because times were relatively simple for Hamas under its original leadership. While there were certainly tensions between it and the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yasser Arafat during the 1990s and early 2000s, the rivalry increased markedly after his death in 2004. The two sides came to direct blows in 2007, resulting in the PA being ousted from Gaza and Hamas being driven underground in the West Bank.
Having previously had relative freedom of movement in both territories, and having been able to cultivate contacts in neighbouring countries due to Israeli deportations of Hamas leaders, it has since been confined to the far smaller and tightly blockaded Gaza. This has presented it with massive economic, political and military challenges.
Before 2006 it had focused primarily on military resistance against Israel, but that year it decided to become a full-fledged political party by taking part in parliamentary elections.
Its election victory, which surprised much of the international community, meant it suddenly had far greater responsibilities than being primarily a militant group or an opposition party. It now had to undertake national governance, having had no previous experience, and with the impossible task of doing so not just under Israeli occupation but also international sanctions.
Being confined to Gaza a year later complicated matters further for Hamas, which has had to govern an impoverished population of 2 million under a tight land, air and sea blockade. This, in addition to facing three full-scale wars waged against Gaza by Israel in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 (Hamas’s geographic confinement and increased visibility as a government making it easier to target), and a recent increase in economic pressure applied by the PA, such as slashing civil servant salaries in Gaza by 30 per cent and halting payments for the territory’s electricity.
All this has created a humanitarian disaster, with the UN warning in 2015 that Gaza could become “uninhabitable” by 2020. These conditions have led to protests among Gazans, and have allowed ISIL to establish a foothold there and directly threaten Hamas’s authority, making good on those threats by carrying out attacks against it.
Hamas’s regional position has also become more precarious. Its maximalist stance vis-à-vis Israel became much more difficult to maintain after the Arab Peace Initiative was first announced in 2002 (and reiterated in 2007 and 2017). The faction’s stance was bound to soften in light of the acceptance of all 22 Arab League members to normalise relations with Israel if it withdrew from the territories occupied since 1967.
Hamas’s closer ties to Iran amid international sanctions estranged it from strategically important Arab states, and the regional dynamics brought about by the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011 made things even more difficult for the movement.
Its refusal to support the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on its own people left Hamas shunned by its erstwhile allies Hizbollah, Iran (which cut off its funding) and Syria (which Hamas had to leave). But this has not ingratiated it with Arab governments opposed to those parties. Furthermore, the close ties developed with Cairo under Mohammed Morsi were turned on their head when he was removed in 2013.
Meanwhile, one of Hamas’s only regional allies in recent years, Turkey, re-normalised ties with Tel Aviv in 2016 following their spat that began in 2010 when Israel raided an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, killing Turkish citizens on board.
Amid these shifting tectonic plates, domestically and regionally, the relative pragmatism of Meshaal and Haniyeh compared to their predecessors is more a necessity than a choice. Hamas’s release earlier this month of its policy document is a product of that. But it has not had the desired effect – hard-line supporters have criticised it for showing weakness, yet its enemies remain unconvinced.
Some of those enemies, particularly Israel – whose prime minister ostentatiously crumpled the document and tossed it into a bin in a video on social media – will maintain their hostility no matter what Hamas does.
But the movement must take its share of the blame, producing a document that should and could have been ground-breaking, but that contained numerous fundamental ambiguities and contradictions, not just compared to its charter (which the document does not replace, as was originally thought), but within the document itself. This was likely the result of the document trying to be everything to everyone, but this was never going to be feasible. In hedging its bets, Hamas’ s big gamble seems to have failed.
Sharif Nashashibi is a journalist and political analyst
