European diplomats’ talks with Hamas must go beyond hostage negotiations

 

Tony Blair, for instance, reflected in 2017: “We were wrong to boycott Hamas after its election win.” The former UK prime minister said that himself, other world leaders and the wider international community should have tried to pull Hamas “into a dialogue” and that they were all “wrong to yield to Israeli pressure to impose an immediate boycott of Hamas after the Islamic faction won Palestinian elections in 2006.”

 

Indeed, excluding Hamas from talks in the past has only functioned to delegitimise and isolate members within the movement who might be more prepared to pursue diplomatic and political solutions – and emboldened the military approach instead.

 

Excluding and financially sanctioning Hamas after it was democratically elected  and channelling all funds and recognition to Fatah, the party that did not win, weakened Palestinian governance structures.

 

If Europeans want to remain relevant in diplomacy in the region, they should work from notable developments such as the July 23 Beijing Unity Agreement, they should condemn the assassinations of key Hamas diplomats, such as Haniyeh. Instead, they should recognise that having Hamas as part of the administration promotes wider Palestinian oversight over its practices.

 

European states should develop their own diplomatic corridors with Qatar for example, building off their previous diplomatic successes, and their history of taking risks to advance multiparty diplomacy, such as France voting for the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the United Nations in the 1970’s when the group was still criminalised.

 

One other concrete effort that European diplomats might take for instance is to pressure Israel for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a political prisoner who could help unite Palestinian fractions.

 

Israel’s ‘spoiler’ approach

 

Any open dialogue with Hamas and the other factions however must also be matched with a recognition of Israel’s ‘spoiler’ position, that being its failure to commit to any diplomatic resolution to the current war, and its continual invasion in the West Bank over the decades, breaking countless UN resolutions. Diplomacy must be directed towards de-escalation of Israeli and American belligerency, and could include the diplomatic closing of the biggest US military base in the Middle East, Al Udeid Air Base to reflect Qatari indignation at the assassination of Haniyeh and a diplomatic move to limit Israeli access to European Union Horizon funding.    

 

While Israel has been involved in negotiations for the release of their hostages, it has otherwise adopted an anti-diplomatic approach and refused to find any diplomatic path to the decolonisation of Palestine more broadly, which much of the international community broadly supports. It has rejected various proposed terms for peace, offered by the US and others, and it has frustrated diplomatic efforts and declared the peace process as a threat to its interests.

 

According to European diplomats, following the victory of Hamas in the 2006 elections, Israeli officials immediately contacted their counterparts in the US and the EU declaring that the only possible response to Hamas’s democratic success should be punishment, boycott and sanctions. In an exclusive interview, one European official told me “Basically, the US was carrying with them Israeli Minister Lieberman’s policy of sanctioning Hamas and was pushing this on European officials”.

 

United in their attempts to spoil the results of the democratic election, Israel and the US committed themselves to a clandestine coup of the newly elected Palestinian government by sending weapons into the Gaza Strip to arm and support one Palestinian faction to destroy another.

 

Israel’s anti-diplomatic position has also seen the use of targeted assassinations and continued escalations despite Hamas’s previous unilateral ceasefires. Over the years Hamas’s concessions, in line with international diplomatic arrangements were met with the mass arrest of Hamas members, the tightening of the siege on Gaza, which included the total ban on the movement of people and continued incursions into the enclave. Israeli security officials openly admitted Hamas had been remarkably effective at enforcing the truce from the Gazan front.

 

Hamas is capable of diplomacy

 

Hamas as a political party and a movement has shown that it is interested and capable of pursuing both a militarised and a diplomatic approach – and diplomatic engagement from Europe’s side could encourage one over the other. While Hamas as a movement acts in remarkable unison, there is divergence amongst its leadership in terms of approach.

 

Since its founding, the movement has demonstrated it can follow several courses of action, reliant on military and diplomatic approaches.  

 

Their decision to participate in the internationally monitored 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, and to pursue a clearly political approach, was ushered in by key diplomatic figures from within the Hamas movement, such as Ahmed Yousef and Ghazi Hamad.

 

But the rejection of these efforts by the international community, and by Europe in particular, discredited these figures who suggested that engagement with elections and continuing with the ceasefire would bring international recognition. In an interview for my book, Yousef told me: “We lost our credibility with our people and we paid a huge price.”

 

The Hamas movement has clear priorities around which dialogue and diplomacy can be built, such as the importance of representative governance, improving the living standards in Gaza, and establishing clear boundaries within which Palestinian governance can be practised.  

 

These were confirmed by the creation of a unity government after the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas relinquished domestic power and gave up six of its nineteen ministries to Fatah and another four to independents, including key positions of interior, finance and foreign ministries. , in order to improve governance and representation and to lift the blockade.

 

The movement has also offered a landmark acceptance of the 1967 borders, which many argued amounted to de facto recognition of the state of Israel.

 

However, once again, Hamas’s diplomatic efforts here were rejected through the imposition of a series of conditions that even senior EU officials stated were non-operationable as they failed to measure or monitor Hamas’s compromises on the conditions. The European-supported siege on Gaza meant  Hamas’s course of action had to change. Hamas’s Ghazi Hamad said:

 

“The international community put us in this cage, in the prison and they refuse to let us see the light from the sun. So our priorities completely changed and they diverted to how to make people survive here. To prevent starvation.”

 

Hamas has done everything the west and Europe expected from them (and the requirements of the Oslo agreement) including elections, de facto recognition of the state of Israel and abiding by the ceasefire – and yet, still they have not only been ignored, but they have been sanctioned and punished despite, even for choosing diplomacy over an armed approach.

 

At this dire moment, Europeans should seize the initiative to formulate an approach towards anticolonial diplomacy. Such an approach can only be developed by listening to the colonised and recognising their will to represent and govern themselves, just as colonised people everywhere have demanded autonomy and self-determination.