By Avi Shlaim

Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank, Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.

The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme. Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. 

Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it. The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.