LUCKY IN ITS ENEMIES:

Hamas began 2021 preparing for elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council. Today, it is engaged in a military standoff with Israel. The movement has approached both with unexpected gusto, but which of the two approaches best represents its soul?

Both do. There is an underlying coherence in Hamas's approach. However, uncovering it leads us to examine the movement's tactical flexibility and attempts to get in front of Palestinian public opinion. Hamas has succeeded in achieving both. Since 2007 it has been bottled up in Gaza, saddled with responsibility for governing the territory's blockaded population, and has engaged in outbreaks of fighting with Israel, interrupted by tenuous ceasefires. This year has presented the movement with two opportunities to break with this situation--the elections and the current war with Israel.

Elections offered Hamas a limited but real opportunity to reemerge in the West Bank, where it has been suppressed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and to enter into Palestinian national structures--a reconvened parliament and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hoping that it would control a very large bloc in a divided parliament, Hamas would have found itself a part of Palestinian decisionmaking and an actor that could no longer be contained or ignored. It had just elected a new leadership that was willing to make concessions to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah in order to move toward elections and Palestinian reconciliation. When Abbas canceled the elections, fearful of the divisions within his own movement (on the supposed but unconvincing grounds that elections were being hampered in Jerusalem), Hamas was left with no seats. But it was also left with rivals whose divisions were now on display, and with a president who has little credibility and few options.

The political vacuum following the cancellation was followed by a profound crisis involving Jerusalem--one that deepened recent and distant Palestinian traumas. When Israel moved to evict Palestinian residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, the effort seemed to echo the Nakba, the defeat and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 after Israel's establishment. By enforcing an Israeli claim to all of the city, by reviving Jewish property claims that predated 1948 while continuing to violate Palestinian ones, Israel made the Nakba appear to be a continuing event rather than a historical memory.

Tweet   @brothersjudd