History has a way of repeating itself, and not always proceeding from tragedy to farce, as the shopworn quotation from Karl Marx would have it.
“Calm settled over Gaza today,” reports the New York Times this morning. In the wake of Israel’s complete withdrawal in 2005, and the ensuing jockeying for power between Hamas and Fatah, the former has now come to power in the strip. What now?
Already there are voices explaining that if Hamas is to satisfy the aspirations of the long-suffering residents of Gaza, it will inevitably be compelled to abandon its terroristic tactics and to embrace a more pragmatic and realistic approach to Israel and to the world around it. And as if on cue, we have a confirming dispatch this morning from the Associated Press: “Hamas vowed Friday to secure the release of kidnapped British journalist Alan Johnston, a promise seemingly meant to avoid alienating the outside world and to tell other armed groups in Gaza that it intends to impose order.” Britain’s Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell, visiting Israel earlier this week, “held out hope that Hamas or some within it would yet moderate,” telling the Jerusalem Post that “I genuinely don’t think that [Hamas’s] positions are set in tablets of stone forever and a day.”
Perhaps, but what can we learn from the recent past?
When Israel withdrew from the security zone it had established in southern Lebanon in 2000, there were numerous predictions, noted the Israeli analyst Gal Luft in 2003, “that the radical Shiite group Hizballah, whose forces had relentlessly attacked the occupying Israeli troops, would close up military operations and henceforth focus solely on Lebanese domestic affairs.”
But what actually happened? First, wrote Luft, Hizballah declared that its “objective was the liberation of the entire land of Palestine and the destruction of the ‘Zionist entity.” It then seized control of the entire buffer zone that had been occupied by Israel and turned it into “a de facto state within a state.” Hizballahland” was what Luft christened this territory as he pointed to the fact that the terrorist organization had “managed to amass an impressive stockpile of weapons, including 10,000 rockets and missiles capable of hitting a quarter of Israel’s population.”
That was 2003. By 2006, Hizballah had 20,000 rockets and missiles, and its depredations led Israel and Lebanon into a massive and bloody war.
What lies ahead for Hamastan? It is of course conceivable—anything being conceivable—that the newly empowered Hamas leadership will move in the direction of pragmatism; that is what our own pragmatic logic suggests they should do. But perhaps these Islamic radicals operate under a different system of reasoning. The spectacle of the losers of the Gaza power struggle—their fellow Palestinians—being tossed from fifteen-story buildings and shot in the knees before being shot in the head suggests that sometimes it is not only history that goes in cycles, but illusions about history as well.
