Terrorist attacks against Israelis have paused, and rocket fire from Gaza is down. The Hamas leader in Damascus is trying to distance himself from Bashar Assad’s regime. Hamas’ parent organization in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, has entered mainstream politics, and U.S. officials have met with its leaders.
And Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have just announced plans for a new unity government.
What does it all mean?
Hamas clearly is undergoing a reorientation as a result of geopolitical changes in the region, said Shlomo Brom, director of the program on Israeli-Palestinian relations at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
“Hamas is moving away from Syria and Iran, and to a certain degree from Hezbollah, and is repositioning itself in line with the popular movements behind the Arab Spring and the democratization process,” Brom said.
But Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t biting. In a statement, the Israeli prime minister suggested that the planned Palestinian unity government is more about P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas joining the extremists than Hamas joining the moderates.
“If Abbas moves to implement what was signed today, he will abandon the path of peace and join forces with the enemies of peace,” Netanyahu said in the statement. “President Abbas, you can’t have it both ways. It’s either a pact with Hamas or peace with Israel.”
An Israeli official who insisted on anonymity said the international community must make clear to Abbas that joining forces with Hamas — which the United States, Israel and many European countries consider a terrorist organization — is a step away from Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“Our recommendation to the international community is that if they want peace, they won’t achieve it by normalizing relations with Hamas,” the official said.
Hamas has offered no sign that it will accept the three minimal requirements for recognition demanded by the Quartet grouping of the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union: recognizing Israel’s right to exist, foreswearing terrorism and accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
But some Israeli officials worry that in the wake of the Arab Spring, pressure might build in the West to deal with Hamas. Last month, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, met with Muslim Brotherhood chairman Mohammed Badie and other senior leaders in the Islamic movement.
“The region is definitely changing, and for some in the international community this means being more amenable to relations with Hamas,” said an Israeli Foreign Ministry official who insisted on anonymity. “However, our position — and the official position of the international community as articulated by the Quartet — is that as long as Hamas advocates terrorism and sticks with its anti-Semitic, genocidal agenda for the destruction of the Jewish people, there must be no political relations with it.”
It’s too early to say whether Hamas is undergoing a real change. In December, during a meeting in Cairo with Fatah and Islamic Jihad, which is also considered a terrorist group, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared his willingness to adopt the Arab Spring’s strategy of popular resistance, as opposed to terrorism. Mashaal also expressed openness to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In other interviews, however, Mashaal has said that “armed resistance is the strategic choice for liberating Palestinian land from the sea to the river” — that is, all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.
Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian commentator and journalist for the Jerusalem Post, said Hamas increasingly is seen as a legitimate player.
Last week, Mashaal met with Jordanian King Abdullah in Amman, and this week Hamas’ prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Bahrain’s king, Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa. Haniyeh also has met with high-level officials in Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt as part of a tour of the region.
“When the world sees the U.S. ambassador to Egypt meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood, people will rightly begin to ask what’s the difference between the Brotherhood and Hamas,” Abu Toameh said.