The following is the first part of a chapter in the forthcoming book The Tragedy of Palestine by James Heartfield. Published with the author’s kind permission.
Back in the days of George W. Bush’s presidency, as America battled the insurgency in Iraq, there was a big embargo on talking to Hamas. US officials insisted that their allies should shun the terror network. But slowly that boycott was chipped away. From 2009 onwards, the United Nations and the European Union have looked to build bridges with the Islamic “Resistance”.
The European Union has often looked for an independent role in the Middle East, not necessarily challenging US strategy, but not just complementing it either. In 1980 the European Union’s Venice Declaration went further than the US in promoting the goal of Palestinian sovereignty. The Madrid Declaration of June 1989 by the European Council established principles that inspired the Oslo Peace Process and Declaration of Principles. As Turkish scholars Sinem Akgül-Açıkmeşe and Soli Özel write, “the EU explicitly tasked itself with conflict management, especially in its neighbourhood, and identified the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a strategic priority” in the European Security Strategy (ESS) of 2003.
The European Union has often looked for an independent role in the Middle East, not necessarily challenging US strategy, but not just complementing it either.
The European Union is heterodox, offering up many faces, so that it is well placed to experiment in policy projects (though perhaps less well placed to follow through). Martin Stobbe makes the point that the European Union is built on overcoming sovereignty, and also on promoting dialogue–values, so EU representatives are predisposed both to distrust Israel’s strident defence of its sovereignty and also to seek an opening towards Palestinians.
With the US so heavily connected to the Israelis and more recently invested in the Palestine Authority, Hamas was isolated on the world stage, and as many Western diplomats feared, finding allies in Iran and anti-Western powers.
According to the European think tank International Crisis Group:
“The international community’s best remaining option is to maximize the Islamist movement’s incentives to move in a political direction through a policy of gradual, conditional engagement”.
It was this outlook that led researcher Paola Caridi to the conclusion that “Hamas’s presence was considered—especially by the Europeans—to be a fundamental step toward the co-option of the Islamist movement within democratic institutions”. It was a moot point, however, who was influencing whom in the exchanges between Europe’s freelance diplomats and Hamas.
“Hamas’s presence was considered—especially by the Europeans—to be a fundamental step toward the co-option of the Islamist movement within democratic institutions”. – Paola Caridi
With 30 years’ service in MI5, Alastair Crooke was well-placed to serve as security consultant to the US’s special envoy to the Middle East, Miguel Moratinos. Crooke helped to broker the 2003 pause in hostilities that ended the Second Intifada. Crooke was keen to talk to Hamas. Indeed he had worked hard to see the world through the eyes of Hamas and other Islamist militias. In his book 2009 book Resistance, Crooke sets out the Hamas perspective, re-writing it to make it more palatable to a Western audience. “Islamist resistance is not the irrational, incomprehensible rage of ‘divine capriciousness’”, Crooke thinks. Rather, “it is a genuinely emancipatory violence intended to expose the essence of the issue and to call humans to a fundamental change of behaviour”.
Islamist resistance is “a genuinely emancipatory violence” – Alastair Crooke
The US-demanded embargo on contact with Hamas was already breaking down when Barack Obama was elected President, having run on a ticket that was amongst other things a repudiation of the Gulf War that his predecessor George W. Bush had fought. In the wake of the Cast Lead attacks, many leaders visited Gaza, like the US’s John Kerry and British minister Douglas Alexander, though mostly they kept to the policy of not directly talking to Hamas.
Clare Short, a former UK International Development Minister, organized a video conference in the Palace of Westminster with Khaled Mashal in April 2009, after a visit to meet the Hamas leader in Damascus. Short replied to critics of the move that the British government had opened a peace process in Northern Ireland by talking to the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army. Liberal Democrat Baroness Jenny Tonge said, “we want the Brits and the European Union to put pressure on the United States”, to meet Hamas as well.
And where the EU was constrained in directly recognizing Hamas, Switzerland was not. Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar visited there in June 2009 to meet Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey. “Hamas is an important political actor and must not be left out in discussions over a solution to the Middle East Peace conflict”, said Calmy-Rey. Later al-Zahar and Hamas Minister of Health Bassam Na’im met with former US Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering and with Robert Malley, who had been Bill Clinton’s special assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs and then Program Director at the International Crisis Group.
“Hamas is an important political actor and must not be left out in discussions over a solution to the Middle East Peace conflict.” – Micheline Calmy-Rey
While the Obama administration still felt constrained by its obligations to Israel, the US military’s thinking on Hamas was clear enough in the 2010 CENTCOM Red Team report to General David Petraeus of US Central Command:
“The US role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hezbollah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities—the government of Lebanon and Fatah—that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively”.
Though Hamas embraces “staunch anti-Israel rejectionist policies”, according to the Red Team, it could be taken for granted that they are “pragmatic and opportunistic”.
Learning Curve
The outcome of Western engagement with Hamas was not dramatic. The organization certainly did try to moderate its language to suit Western ears, but it did not substantially change its stance. CENTCOM’s Red Team analysts were right that Hamas could be very pragmatic in how it expressed itself, but it remained dogmatic about its core beliefs. The effect was that the organization got lost in word games that were never entirely convincing. More marked in the end was not the accommodation that Hamas made to its European interlocutors, but the accommodations that they made trying to meet Hamas halfway.
“In the late 2000s”, according to King’s College London lecturer Jeroen Gunning, “Hamas leaders engaged with Swiss negotiators and toned down their rhetoric, [removed] some of the anti-Semitic references from their website, and dropped a decision to impose the hijab, the headscarf, in court, all through these negotiations”. It was a flattering picture of the impact of engagement. But how profound were the changes?
Khaled Mashal, head of the Hamas Politburo, explained his thinking on sovereignty to Western observers in a string of contradictory ideas:
“We in Hamas, like most of the Palestinian factions, have accepted the idea of a state with the borders of 4 June 1967. However, we have said that we will not recognize Israel. Why? Because the Palestinian people are convinced that the land which Israel occupies is their land. So while they accept a state with the borders of 1967, they do not want to give legitimacy to those who occupied their lands 60 or 70 years ago. So the formula is simply this: if through politics we can come to agree a Palestinian state with the borders of 1967, why should we be forced to renounce our beliefs and feelings, too, by recognizing Israel?”
It was a nonsensical formulation, crafted for Westerners. Refusing to recognize Israel could only lead to the obvious conclusion that Israel would refuse to recognize Palestine, in which case there could be no agreement. But remarkably Alastair Crooke repeats Mashal’s arguments as if they were good coin, and not the evasions that everyone could see. Crooke even tidies up Mashal’s argument to make it yet more Western, emphasizing the psychology of injured pride:
To Hamas, the international demand on them for prior recognition of an Israeli right, before Palestinian rights are recognized, seems to require from them to concede the rights of a superior Jewish title to their land, while disdaining their own rights as a secondary consideration to securing the Palestinian recognition of Israel.
In 2012, Mashal was re-elected to his position, defeating the supposedly more pragmatic Ismail Haniyeh. In December of that year, he took the opportunity to outline his ideas to his own supporters in Gaza: “Palestine is ours from the sea to the river and from the north to the south. There will be no concessions, not even on a square centimeter of land”.
Hamas’s isolation was mitigated by the events of the Arab Spring. First, the election of Mohammed Morsi of the Freedom and Justice Party—which is to say the Muslim Brotherhood—as president of Egypt meant that for the first time Hamas had an ally in the Heliopolis Palace in Cairo. For the brief period that Morsi was in power, traffic across the Rafah crossing took off. There were protests outside the Palestine Authority buildings in Ramallah, as there were outside government buildings and in squares across the Middle East. The main demand was that Fatah and Hamas settle their differences: “the end of division”. Ismail Haniyeh took the opportunity to invite Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah chairman and leader of the Palestinian Authority, to Gaza. He accepted the invitation, and on 4 May 2011, a new deal was reached between Fatah and Hamas. In other respects, Hamas’s Arab Spring was a disappointment. Beyond the opening of the Rafah crossing, Morsi was too preoccupied with his own authority, and locked in too many arguments about the new Egyptian constitution, to do anything to help Hamas—even if he had been minded to.
In 2013, Morsi was overthrown by the Army candidate Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who promptly closed the border. All across the Middle East, the nationalists and monarchs were reining in the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2014, and Jordan banned it in 2020 (and then again, more definitively, in 2025).
Read part 2 here.
