In his 1923 essay “On the Iron Wall,” Vladimir Jabotinsky warns against believing that Palestinian Arabs “can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine in return for cultural and economic advantages.” Doron Matza argues that today’s Israeli policymakers have been similarly seduced by the prospect of convincing Hamas to cease its attacks in exchange for the creation of economic opportunities and allowing an influx of foreign aid to Gaza:
Economic easing and a partial relaxation of the so-called Israeli “siege” of the Gaza Strip, [which in reality is a blockade on items that can be used for military purposes], are meant, like the spurned territorial concessions of the 1990s, to inspire Hamas and all the other Palestinian terrorist elements in Gaza to lay down their arms and make peace with Israel.
In recent years, this notion has become a cornerstone of Israel’s policy toward Gaza, comporting as it does with Israel’s reluctance to engage in further military campaigns in the Strip. So great has Israel’s attachment to this misguided idea become that it has begun to misrepresent Hamas’s terrorism as “disobedience” that has nothing to do with the organization’s official goal of destroying the Jewish state, which Hamas makes no attempt to conceal.
Not even the violence of the Gaza war in May could change this outlook among Israelis. On the contrary: it anchored the assumption that an economic settlement was possible. This perception reveals that Israelis have not yet internalized the fact that like the PLO, which was unwilling to accept the existence of Israel in any shape or form and expressed that view with violence even as it pretended to negotiate [in the 1990s], Hamas’s strategy is based on a combination of negotiations and terrorism.
This combination of a false willingness to negotiate and constant violent behavior also characterizes Iran in its relations with the U.S. as it attempts to forge a path toward a nuclear weapon. This approach works well for terrorist entities because their Western enemies, be they American or Israeli, remain committed to the idea of “either/or”—either war or concessions.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/economy-for-peace/