Is Hamas Pursuing Its Own Path to Statehood?

Hamas has recently increased its public attacks on Mahmoud Abbas, and is reportedly consulting with other Islamist groups about declaring Gaza an independent state or emirate. Khaled Abu Toameh explains:

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority continue to seek the world’s help and support in establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem. But they are not telling the world how exactly they intend to achieve this goal, at a time when Hamas is consolidating its grip over the Gaza Strip and making plans to turn it into a separate state. . . .

If and when Hamas carries out its plan and establishes its own sovereign state, . . . the international community, primarily the U.S. and EU, will have to come to terms with the fact that the two-state solution has finally been realized; the Palestinians ended up with two states of their own—an Islamist emirate in the Gaza Strip and a PLO-controlled state in the West Bank.

The Americans and Europeans will also have to listen very carefully to what Hamas is saying: namely, that a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, or any part of the Palestinian territories, would not end its struggle to destroy Israel and replace it with the State of Greater Palestine.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Fatah, Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian statehood

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF