Transcript of Remarks by Nadia Hijab
'For the Record' No. 260 (24 July 2006)

At a recent Palestine Center briefing, Nadia Hijab, senior fellow and co-director of the Washington office of the Institute for Palestine Studies, argued that the core principle behind Hamas' resistance is the deprivation of basic human rights to the Palestinian people. She said recent changes within Hamas represent a challenge to Israel because they indicate that Hamas wants to seek peace with Israel. After analyzing the role in and responses to the conflict of other Arab states and members of the Quartet, she affirmed a recent G8 statement saying the only solution to the most recent violence in the region is a comprehensive Middle East peace.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
20 July 2006

Nadia Hijab:

Thank you for organizing this lecture series and thank you for inviting me. It's good to be back at The Palestine Center. Before we start I just want to quickly introduce the organization I'm with, which is the Institute for Palestine Studies. It was established in 1963 and it's the leading publisher of books and journals on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It actually has the biggest library in the world on the issue, and the biggest collection of Hebrew works in the Arab world. The Journal of Palestine Studies, which IPS publishes as its flagship journal, leads all the journals on the Middle East. Some 20 percent of all articles downloaded on the Middle East are from the Journal of Palestine Studies. If you want, there are some subscription forms at the front entrance.

I was asked to talk about Hamas, its neighbors and the Quartet. What I'm going to try to do is show why Hamas poses such a challenge to the international community and how the responses have led to the conflagration we see today. Always when one is faced with a situation that appears very confusing and very complicated it is good to try and identify a core principle that helps you cut through all the veils that may obscure the issue. The core principle behind and beneath what's going on today is really very simple: when people are deprived of their rights, they will always resist.

It is worth remembering what human rights are. They are a set of standards that were established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and codified in international laws and conventions. There are a number of conventions that predate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which deal with the laws of war, such as the Geneva Conventions. Again, the core concept at the base of all these international laws is very simple. It is that human beings have the right to human dignity. The concept of human dignity is something that all human beings understand. You will often read, when people are interviewed after a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina or even in the present war that is going on today [in Lebanon and Israel], 'all we want is to live with dignity.' That is what these laws were established to do.

It is also worth remembering just a couple of the international recognized rights that apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They include the right to self-determination, which the Palestinians have. They include the non-admissibility of occupation of territory by war, which is the basis of the United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, passed at the end of the 1967 war, and they include the fact that peoples have a right to return to homes from which they have been exiled or become refugees.

So basically when people are deprived of their rights they will resist. What will differ, of course, is the way they resist. Will they engage in nonviolent resistance, like the Palestinians did during the first intifada against Israel at the end of the 1980s or like the African-Americans did in this country for their civil rights? Or, will they engage in violent resistance?

Here is where Hamas comes in. Today, it is really the major Palestinian movement that is still resisting, and that is why it challenges the international community. It is not only because so many Palestinians under occupation support it, but also because it has changed. It now understands that to be effective, resistance is not just military but also must be political, diplomatic, and economic. As I'm sure you know, the mantle of resistance was carried by Fateh and the PLO. After Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, Fateh leaders were able to return from exile to the West Bank and Gaza. Their understanding was that they were going to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, they found themselves trapped in a situation where Israeli colonization of the land continued, and between 1993 and 1999 the period when Israel and the PLO signed the twelve agreements that constitute the Oslo Accords the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza doubled from 200,000 to 400,000. Travel between the West Bank and Jerusalem became increasingly difficult now it's practically impossible. Even among Palestinian towns and villages inside the West Bank itself travel was difficult and is now practically impossible.

Israel claims that these measures, like the checkpoints and the wall it started building are necessary to keep Palestinians under control. But Palestinians were resisting because they were under Israeli occupation. The situation on the ground was terrible. However, Fateh and the PLO had too much invested in the Oslo Accords to resist in any meaningful way. Before the Oslo Accords, there had been a very effective local leadership organizing resistance to the Israeli occupation, which led the first intifada, but they either joined the government or established non-governmental organizations to pursue projects funded by international donors.

In spite of the terrible situation on the ground, the PLO and Fateh continued to pay lip service to the peace process. This arrangement suited everyone just fine; it suited Israel fine, it suited the Arabs fine, and it suited the United States and the international community just fine. Everybody could speak about the peace process that was under way while ignoring the reality on the ground.

Along comes Hamas. Not only does it refuse to pay lip service to the peace process, it also articulates very well what Palestinian rights are and in a way that we haven't heard the PLO and Fateh articulate in recent times. It does so through the pages of the western media as well as in diplomatic outreach and with an organized body of Palestinians behind it.

As I was saying, Hamas has evolved. It now understands that resistance comes in many forms, and in fact it felt strong enough in the year prior to the elections of January 2006 to call a ceasefire and to focus on political resistance. It maintained a unilateral ceasefire with Israel although Israel did not reciprocate since January 2005.

Hamas is also very much in touch with the population and their needs. Because it continues to organize amongst the people, it understood that people were tired of the suicide bombings and Israel's retaliations. That is another reason why it called for a halt, or ceasefire. Because it organizes amongst the people, it also knows that the people are solidly behind a two-state solution and that it had to deal with this reality.

This is a big shift for Hamas. It went from a platform of liberating all of Palestine to accepting that a two-state solution has to be the outcome of the struggle. In this way it followed the pattern of Fateh in the 1970s and 1980s. If you want a very good discussion of Hamas' pragmatic evolution, there is an article by Henry Siegman in The New York Review of Books about a couple months ago. There is also an analysis by Khaled Hroub, an expert on Hamas, which will be in the volume of the Journal of Palestine Studies that comes out at the end of the summer.

Finally, Hamas also understood the extent of the people's frustration with corruption, the lack of services, security and the promised clean government. In the elections, it shaped its message to represent the majority of Palestinians, just as Fateh had done decades ago but without, however, compromising on rights established under international law. Hamas is especially vocal about the refugees' Right of Return because it believes in that right and in this way can maintain the support of the four million Palestinians who live in refugee camps and in exile.

Now, how have the neighbors been dealing with Hamas? Until the present crisis, the situation was tricky for Egypt and Jordan. Of course, it has become much more difficult now. Both Egypt and Jordan had encouraged Islamist movements so as to offset the power of the communists and the socialists in their countries, just as Israel, in fact, had encouraged Hamas and the Islamist movements to counter the nationalist Fateh. In both Egypt and Jordan, the Islamists went on to organize amongst the people and to grow in strength. As you know, at the same time both Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel and both have extremely strong relations with the United States, so much so that their governments, you could argue, are effectively dependent on the U.S. for political and economic survival.

Now both Egypt and Jordan maintain some relations with Hamas. Egypt especially positioned itself to mediate and support dialogue among Palestinian groups and negotiations between Palestinians and Israel. It made itself indispensable during Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 by agreeing to place Egyptian troops on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Egypt maintains a delicate balancing act, appearing supportive rather than confrontational so as not to arouse its own very strong Muslim Brotherhood, which won a significant number of parliamentary seats at the end of 2005. At the same time, since Hamas' election Egypt has been urging Hamas to be realistic and to recognize Israel and the peace process, and to accept the peace process in the face of the economic siege imposed by Israel, the U.S. and Europe. Most recently, Egypt tried to negotiate a deal between Israel and the Palestinians for the release of the captured Israeli soldier before the situation completely spiraled out of control.

Jordan has also kept up a bit of a delicate balancing act, more so while King Hussein was alive. It was perhaps more balanced when Israel tried to assassinate Hamas [Damascus-based] leader Khaled Mashaal on Jordanian soil, infuriating King Hussein. He forced them to provide an antidote for the poison and also secured the release of Hamas leader Sheikh [Ahmed Ismail] Yassin from Israeli jail by way of reparation. Of course, Yassin was later assassinated by Israel.

More recently Jordan has closed Hamas' offices in Jordan and deported Hamas leaders. Jordan, as you know, has a very large Palestinian population the majority [of its citizens] are Palestinian and it also has a very strong Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan is especially alarmed by Israel's land-settlement annexation policies. Jordan probably wants a two-state solution more than the Palestinians do, because otherwise it is very worried that this refrain that keeps coming up in Israeli right-wing politics that Jordan is Palestine will come into being.

Let's turn now to the last two of Hamas' neighbors, Israel and Lebanon. As for Israel, we have all seen how it responded to the Hamas election. It began by cutting off the Palestinian tax revenues, which are actually the Palestinians' own money that Israelis collect on behalf of Palestinians under the Oslo Accords. You have to ask yourself what were they thinking when they signed this accord, permitting Israel to do this on their behalf. That was their first step. Then Israel worked with the United States, Europe and the rest of the West to impose an economic siege on Hamas, repeating this mantra that it has to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept all previous agreements.

Hamas argued that it had, in fact, been upholding a ceasefire with Israel, that recognition between Israel and Palestine should be mutual, and that previous agreements had actually proven disastrous for the Palestinians, but that it would be happy to support any agreements that recognized Palestinian rights.

We should remember that Israel basically has treated the PLO, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas only marginally better than it has treated Hamas. Despite of the PLO's formal recognition of Israel and the subsequent amendment to its charter, Israel continued to colonize the West Bank. It never released any significant number of Palestinian prisoners there are still about 10,000 in Israeli jails and it has replaced many of the checkpoints with this wall that I'm sure you have all read about that cuts well into the West Bank and separates not only Israel from Palestinians but Palestinians from each other, so that they are now trapped in towns and villages.

Israel claims it needed to construct the wall for security purposes, but now it admits what Palestinians have been saying all along, which is that this is a wall meant to annex land and resources to Israel and that it plans to have its [permanent] border along the route of this wall. So, Palestinians will continue to be isolated from each other by the wall and by Jewish-only roads.

As you know Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally in September 2005, but the Israeli siege on Gaza was not lifted. I don't know if you remember, but all the might of the U.S. in the form of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was necessary to get Israel to agree to let Palestinian produce out of Gaza so as to rescue the harvest. Israel agreed to this and then it reneged on the agreement, leaving Palestinian produce to rot.

As the Israeli journalist Yigal Sarena, who writes on YNet News, which is the English language version of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth, said on 16 July 2006, 'We pulled out of Gaza unilaterally and left Gaza a wasteland. I have visited Gaza many times since the pullout and seen the hell of hunger, the misery. It is a pressure cooker with no release valve.'

Israel's attacks on Gaza became more and more fierce in response to the Qassam rockets fired by Islamic Jihad against southern Israeli towns. I want to quote another Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who writes for Ha'aretz. In a piece he wrote just the other day he said,

 'What would have happened if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege it had imposed on Gaza? Would it open the border to Palestinian laborers'[and] Encourage investment in Gaza? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, there case would disappear from the agenda here and around the world. Israel would continue with the convergence, which is solely meant to serve its goals, ignoring their needs. Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people in Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first twenty years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it.

'Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise. With our own hands, we are now once again pushing the Palestinians into using the petty arms they have; and in response, we employ nearly the entire enormous arsenal at our disposal, and continue to complain that 'they started.''

So the large scale Israeli attack on Gaza, which began on June 25, began after Palestinian resistance groups had captured an Israeli soldier and killed two others. That was actually carried out after an Israeli missile killed an entire family on the beach after Israel had kidnapped a doctor and his brother, and after many other actions in fact. The groups wanted to exchange the soldier for Palestinian women and children prisoners in Israeli jails. There [are] over 300 Palestinian children and over 100 Palestinian women in Israeli jails.

Israel refused to negotiate and began its attack by destroying the only power plant in Gaza, ironically a plant that had been built by a U.S. company. One-point-three million people, 70 percent of whom are already living below the poverty line due to the economic siege and were already running out of food and medicine, now have only a few hours of water and electricity each day to face the same kind of heat that we are dealing with here in Washington, DC.

Israel has continued to attack Gaza relentlessly since then with tremendous loss of life and injuries amongst Palestinian civilians and loss of key infrastructure. With very little clean water, sewage, and no garbage collection, you can foresee contagious diseases decimating the population at any time. UN agencies have warned repeatedly of a humanitarian disaster. The scale of the Israeli attack makes it clear that it wants to try and get rid of Hamas once and for all.

Finally we come to Lebanon. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in order to get rid of the Palestinian resistance. The PLO was replaced it got kicked out of Lebanon by the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hizbollah, which until then had not really been a presence on the Lebanese scene and after which it continued to attack the Israelis until they withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon in the year 2000, leaving behind one little disputed piece of land, the Sheba'a Farms. Since 2000, Hizbollah and Israel have had continued skirmishes. At one point Hizbollah captured three Israeli soldiers and did conduct a prisoner exchange with Israel.

Now the timing of Hizbollah's attack on Israeli soldiers on 12 July 2006 a few days after the Israelis began bombing Gaza with such ferocity, has been the source of much speculation. Some analysts have said that it was to distract international attention from Syria and Iran, both of which are coming up soon before the UN, the former in connection with the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and the latter in connection with its nuclear energy program. Other analysts and Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah himself say that Hizbollah's attack was to force the release of the remaining Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jail as well as of Palestinian and Arab prisoners and to support the Palestinians under attack [in Gaza]. Whatever the case, and whether Hizbollah miscalculated and thought Israel would treat this as just another border skirmish or [if it knew] the Israeli response would be on the scale it was, the fact is that Israeli statements indicate that [its intention is] to get rid of Hizbollah once and for all. The indications are also that Israel has the support of the Bush administration for its actions in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Now politically, Israel believes it has secured U.S. support for its annexation plans in the West Bank through the exchange of letters between Bush and [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in April 2004. In that exchange of letters, the U.S. signed off on Israel's plan to annex some of the West Bank. It said it was impossible to think that Israel could withdraw from its population centers i.e., its settlements in the West Bank. The letters also said it was impossible to consider that the Palestinians could ever return to their homes and accepted that Israel would always be a Jewish state that is, Israel would always have a Jewish majority. That's the sum of the exchange of letters.

Basically, a Hamas that is pushing for peace, just like Fateh and the PLO pushed for peace before it a peace that is based on a two-state solution, the Right of Return for the refugees, and mutual recognition between Israel and Palestine such a Hamas will torpedo what is now called the Israeli convergence plan. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, even today from his place in hiding is still pushing this peace plan. He managed to publish an op-ed in The Washington Post a couple days ago, where he made the clearest statement to date of what Hamas' aims are, or how it sees Palestinian aims and aspirations. He said, 'Addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. . . means statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law.' This is an extremely important statement because with the statement about the refugees, it can be read not that the Right of Return is negotiable, but that the way that that right is implemented is something that can be discussed. He specifies a capital in Arab East Jerusalem and statehood for the West Bank and Gaza.

That is what is scariest about Hamas not any of the military actions that it or any of the other Palestinian groups can do, for Israel is one of the strongest military powers in the world. What is really scary is this declaration that we want peace with Israel, a state alongside Israel, and these are our terms.

The question is, can Israel achieve its objective of wiping out Hamas and Hizbollah? Before addressing this question I want to look quickly at the response of the international community to the Hamas election over the past year. As you know the Quartet, which includes the European Union, the United States, Russia, and the UN, has called on Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce violence, and recognize all previous agreements. The EU, the U.S., and other western countries suspended aid to the PA and cut off meetings with Hamas. Russia provided humanitarian relief to Abbas and has met with Hamas officials. It didn't cut off meetings with Hamas, but it did meet with them to affirm this message that they have to do those three things recognize Israel, renounce violence and recognize all previous agreements.

As the humanitarian situation worsened, the EU proposed and devised an international mechanism to get aid to the Palestinians without going through Hamas, which was approved by the Quartet. Some of this aid will pay salaries of health workers, but not the civil servants who number about 160,000 and whose income supported nearly one million Palestinians. The first EU aid, which just got through the other day, has had to pay for fuel because of the destroyed electricity plant.

Now the 'G8', as you know, met a few days ago and they issued a statement at their summit in which they blamed the immediate crisis on extremists. However, the G8, which of course include the United States, defined the root cause this was the second paragraph in their statement, one simple line that stood out because it was just one line on its own. It defined the root cause of the problems in the region as being the absence of a comprehensive Middle East peace. To solve the immediate crisis, the G8 called for not just the return of Israeli soldiers and an end to shelling of Israeli territory, but also an end to Israeli military operations, the early withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the release of arrested Palestinian ministers and parliamentarians. This statement, by calling for the release of those arrested Palestinian ministers and parliamentarians, recognizes that these are democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people even though they are all members of Hamas.

The G8 goes on to say that the next step should be a move toward a two-state solution under the Road Map and progress in accordance with the relevant UN Security Council resolutions. It called not just on Palestinians to accept all previous agreements but also on Israel to refrain from unilateral acts that could prejudice a final settlement. At this time, the EU and the UN are working on a plan to field a stronger international force on the border between Israel and Lebanon.

So you see that the G8 actually produced quite a balanced statement given their previous position. The tragedy is that neither the Europeans nor certainly the Bush administration have put their considerable economic and political power behind this statement. The United States, on the contrary, is reported to have given Israel a green light to carry on for a few more days to finish the job i.e., of eliminating Hizbollah and Hamas.

So back to the question. Can Israel succeed? Well, to help answer this question we need to look at recent history: did it succeed before? It got the PLO out of Lebanon but Hizbollah, much stronger militarily today than the PLO used to be, has replaced the PLO in southern Lebanon. Israel left Lebanon unilaterally and now it has had to go back in. Israel managed to tame the PLO and Fateh and got them to continue to pay lip service to the peace process, but it couldn't get Fateh and the PLO to sign an agreement that would not return the West Bank to the Palestinians [or relinquish their right to] a sovereign state in the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital, which is why the Camp David talks failed in 2000. As the PLO got weaker, Hamas got stronger to lead the resistance that Fateh and the PLO used to lead. Israel left Gaza unilaterally, and now it has had to go back in. As Yigal Sarena, the Israel journalist, wrote, 'Gaza and Lebanon are traps we return to periodically.'

Both the Lebanese government and the PA are too weak to take on Hizbollah and Hamas, respectively. They can't disarm them; they are too weak. No matter how Israel punishes the Lebanese and Palestinian civilians the use of quarter-ton or one-ton bombs to flatten homes and infrastructure if history is anything to go by will only bring new recruits to these resistance movements. History shows that trying to deal with a political problem through military means does not work. Meanwhile, there is a growing international movement in churches, trade unions, and other civil society groups among academics and professionals in Europe, the United States and Canada which are responding to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel recognizes Palestinian rights.

I want to quote the American Jewish historian Tony Judt, who is a highly respected historian. It is always good to listen to historians because they have seen history I mean, obviously they can get it wrong, too but they can also tell you what the chances are of the future based on the past. Tony Judd wrote in Ha'aretz in May 2006 'The times, they are indeed a-changing. It has become commonplace to compare Israel, at best, to an occupying colonizer; at worst, to South Africa, of race laws and Bantustans.' Then he says, in trying to describe the trends he is seeing that lead him to write like this, 'I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish civil war in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression.' Judd writes, 'I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such as pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. 'You are wrong,' one young women replied. 'What about Israel?' To my great surprise, most of the class, including many of the sizable Jewish contingent, nodded approval.'

These are trends. They are maybe not visible trends and are small trends at the moment, but these are the trends. I think it is worth recalling that the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa can be traced back to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice [ICJ] in the 1970s against South Africa. The ICJ in July 2004 passed an advisory opinion that reaffirmed the illegality of Israel's wall in the West Bank and actually its whole associated regime, calling for compensation for Palestinian losses of land and livelihood and for all states not to support these illegal actions. It reaffirmed, yet again, that the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination.

The question is where we go from here. This is my final remark ' as there is no 'comprehensive solution,' in the words of the G8, I would say that the region is doomed until there is such a comprehensive solution. As I said at the beginning of my talk, human beings who are unable to exercise their human rights will always resist. How many more people will have to die before this reality is recognized?

Nadia Hijab is senior fellow and co-director at the DC-based Institute for Palestine Studies. She has worked as an independent consultant for international organizations on human rights, human development, gender, and the media. She has served as co-chair of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. She is the author of Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work (1988).

This 'For the Record' transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views are hers alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.