by James M Dorsey
The killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is about more than Israel’s targeting of the group’s officials whenever and wherever an opportunity arises.
Mr. Haniyeh was known as a ‘pragmatist’ and a ‘moderate’ within Hamas. His killing was as much about achieving Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas militarily and politically as it was about quashing any chance that a post-war Hamas would potentially be more accepting of a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Construction company owner Danny Makhlouf recalls employing Mr. Haniyeh as a construction worker at 16 in 1978 and taking him into his family in Ashkelon, from where Mr. Haniyeh’s parents fled to Gaza in 1963.
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In response to Mr. Makhlouf’s plea, Mr. Haniyeh pledged he “will no longer go out on the roads with terror,” the entrepreneur quoted the Hamas leader as saying.
Mr. Haniyeh may have been less honest than he had led Mr. Makhlouf to believe. The Hamas leader had no intention of keeping his promise. Since meeting Mr. Makhlouf, houses built by Mr. Haniyeh and the entrepreneur were targeted by Hamas rockets fired from Gaza at the Israeli port city.
Moreover, there is no shortage of bloodcurdling Haniyeh statements since Mr. Makhlouf’s visit that glorify armed struggle and the spilling of innocent Palestinian blood to fuel “the revolutionary spirit” and insist that a Palestinian state should be established in all of historic Palestine.
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Ismail Haniyeh leads Hamas leaders in prayer on October 7, 2023. Source: X
A video circulating on social media on October 7 shows Mr. Haniyeh kneeling and leading Hamas leaders in prayers as they celebrated the group’s attack on Israel in which hundreds of innocent civilians were slaughtered. As they prayed, a television featured live coverage of the assault.
With Israeli statements and actions no less bloodcurdling, the information war between Israel, Hamas, and the group’s supporters, in which Israelis point to statements by Mr. Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders, amounts to the pot calling the kettle back.
Even so, International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan felt he had sufficient evidence for involvement in war crimes to ask the court to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Haniyeh, alongside two other Hamas leaders and two Israelis, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
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Mohammed Deif. Credit: Al Jazeera
Alongside Mr. Haniyeh, Mr. Khan sought an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, the hardline commander of Hamas’s military wing, the Issam al-Qassam Brigades. Israel said a day after Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination that it had killed Mr. Deif in an attack on the Gazan city of Khan Younis on July 13. The Brigades have yet to confirm Mr Deif’s demise.
It was not immediately clear whether the deaths of Messrs. Deif and Haniyeh would soften Hamas’ Gaza ceasefire negotiating position and/or serve as a cover that would allow Mr. Netanyahu to be more flexible in the US-Qatar-Egypt mediated talks.
Mr. Haniyeh was not the first Gaza ceasefire negotiator willing to come to a long-term arrangement with Israel to be targeted. An Israeli drone strike killed Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari in 2012, days before the 2012 Gaza war erupted.
“Mr. Jabari was not a man of peace; he didn’t believe in peace with Israel and refused to have any direct contact with Israeli leaders and even non-officials like me. My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me,” recalled Israeli hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin in a 2012 New York Times op-ed. Mr. Baskin was instrumental in negotiating Hamas’ release in 2011 of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
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Even so, Mr. Baskin noted that Mr. Jabari “wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad.”
Mr. Baskin said Israeli security officials were aware of the proposal and discussions with Hamas. In a text message, Mr. Baskin said then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud “Barak had reservations about the draft.”
Mr. Baskin added that “other key Hamas leaders and members of the Shura Council, its senior decision-making body, supported a new cease-fire effort because they, like Mr. Jabari, understood the futility of successive rocket attacks against Israel that left no real damage on Israel and dozens of casualties in Gaza. Mr. Jabari was not prepared to give up the strategy of ‘resistance,’ meaning fighting Israel, but he saw the need for a new strategy and was prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.”
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The draft proposed to break the Gaza cycle of violence by creating a mechanism to avoid attacks and escalation. The mechanism involved Israeli intelligence advising Hamas via Egypt of perceived threats of an attack that would allow Mr. Jabari to prevent them.
“The goal was to move beyond the patterns of the past… Mr. Jabari and his forces would have had an opportunity to prove that they were serious when they told Egyptian intelligence officials that they were not interested in escalation. If Mr. Jabari had agreed to the draft, then we could have prevented this new round of violence, Mr. Baskin said, referring to the 2012 war.
The deaths of Messrs. Haniyeh and Deif were not the first time Israel killed top Hamas leaders within a matter of weeks. In 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas co-founders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in attacks less than a month apart.
A quadriplegic, Mr. Yassin was killed less than three months after he proposed a long-term truce with Israel “if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” Mr. Al-Rantisi was assassinated al-Rantisi, was assassinated less than three months after he made a similar offer.
With both Israel and Hamas accused of committing war crimes, Messrs. Haniyeh and Deif’s killing is unlikely to stop in its tracks a torturous process within Hamas that could lead the group to unambiguously come to grips with Israel’s existence and embrace a two-state solution.
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Khalil al-Hayya. Credit: Al Mayadeen
Two frontrunners to succeed Mr. Haniyeh as head of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Mashal and Khalil al-Hayya, Mr. Haniyeh’s deputy, are widely viewed as pragmatists.
In April, Mr. Al-Hayya, a Hamas ceasefire negotiator, suggested that Hamas would agree to a truce of five years or more, lay down its weapons, and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Hamas’ internal debate became evident when it adopted its 2017 amended charter and has continued despite the war. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that Hamas will ultimately follow in the footsteps of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) recognition of Israel and renunciation of armed struggle.
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Israel asserts that Hamas’ notion of a long-term ‘hudna’ or armistice rather than Palestinian de jure recognition of the Jewish state in the context of two states demonstrates the group’s determination to destroy Israel and maintain the right to armed resistance.
Unlike the PLO’s recognition of Israel in the 1980s as the prelude to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Hamas’ 2017 amended Charter envisions two states living side-by-side without recognising one another and without maintaining full diplomatic relations.
Rejecting any Israeli rights and all United Nations resolutions and other international agreements that recognize equal national rights for Israelis and Palestinians, the Charter stipulates that “there shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity… Without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, along the lines of June 4, 1967…to be a formula of national consensus… Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty, and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah,” the global Muslim community of the faithful.
Defending Hamas’ position, Azzam Tamimi, a 69-year-old scholar and journalist with close ties to the group, suggested that a long-term hudna rather than a peace agreement “is the only way you can have disengagement; you can have a real ceasefire.”
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Azzam Tamimi. Credit: Middle East Eye
Mr. Tamimi argued that Hamas’ notion “is a de facto recognition of the status quo, but it’s not a de jure recognition.”
Insisting that he would “never, ever accept the legitimacy of the occupation of my mother’s house in Beersheba,” Mr. Tamimi said he “would accept, and, I believe, most Palestinians represented by Hamas would accept, the idea that this conflict is not delivering what either side is expecting, and therefore it’s not a bad idea to disengage to stop fighting…for ten years, 15 years, or 30 years… During that period, people can have a respite. Then there will be a new generation emerging and let future generations decide what they want to do about this conflict.”
Hamas pragmatists have since 2017 privately argued that they could renounce the armed struggle and acknowledge Israel’s existence rather than its right to exist at the end of peace negotiations not as a pre-condition for talks.
The pragmatists pointed to the failure of the PLO’s 1993 and 1994 Oslo Accords with Israel to produce a Palestinian state despite the PLO playing its trump cards of ending the armed struggle and recognising Israel at the outset of the talks rather than once the terms of an agreement had been negotiated.
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Hamas protesters call on PLO to abandon Oslo Accords. Credit: Ikhla
The pragmatists, like many Palestinians, argue that the PLO strategy produced a situation in which Palestinians are worse off than they were before the Oslo Accords, highlighted by the rise of Mr. Netanyahu’s government coalition, the most ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative in Israel’s history, that rejects the notion of Palestinian statehood and claims all historic Palestine.
In other words, Hamas and Palestinians today deal with an Israeli government and public that rejects concepts of Palestinian rights and aspirations for an independent state and brutally represses expressions of Palestinian identity, unlike Israeli governments at the time of the PLO’s maneuvering that were willing to pay lip service to a territorial compromise.
Hamas fuelled Israeli rejectionism with its October 7 targeting of civilians and shares responsibility for Israel’s devastation of Palestinian lives and infrastructure in Gaza.
The October 7 carnage exceeded anything wracked by the PLO and its constituents’ attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three Western airliners in 1970 and blows them up at Jordan’s Dawson airfield. Credit: Wikipedia
Even so, the Hamas attack, like the PLO’s operations, intended to force the international community to prioritise the plight of the Palestinians at a time that it was threatened with oblivion.
Nevertheless, the Hamas attack’s toll on Palestinians is far higher than anything Palestinians experienced at the hands of Israel in the wake of the PLO’s hijacking of airliners and attacks on civilian targets in Israel and elsewhere and popular uprisings in the 1990s and early 2000s against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The Hamas attack and Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza have hardened attitudes on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Yet, much like Israel’s targeting of PLO leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, Messrs. Haniyeh and Deif’s assassinations are unlikely to bring debate within Hamas to a screeching halt.
“The multiple assassinations against Hamas leaders by Israel in the early 2000s were a key part of making Hamas win the 2007 Palestinian elections. The biggest loser from Haniyah’s assassination in Palestine is the PLO/Fatah,” said Ghanem Nuseibeh, a London-based consultant who campaigns against anti-Semitism.
Mr. Nuseibeh was referring to the backbone of the PLO and President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Authority, Al Fatah, a guerilla movement-turned-political party, whose credibility has been severely tarnished by corruption, mismanagement, ineffectiveness, and repressive policies.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.