Hamas leaders savoring their stunning electoral victory might contemplate the first likely casualty: funding for a Palestinian Authority that is on the verge of bankruptcy. President Bush, who defied Congress last year to hand over $50 million to the Palestinian Authority, made clear he would not have a comparable relationship with a Hamas government.
“The United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally Israel, and that people must renounce that part of their platform,” Bush said Thursday, after it became clear that Hamas had trounced P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party in legislative elections.
Bush already was garnering an international consensus on the issue; his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, spent much of Thursday consulting with U.S. allies, and it apparently paid off. By the end of the day, European leaders were echoing Bush’s statement.
“We can only do business with people who renounce terrorism,” a spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, and the sentiment was echoed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. European officials predicted unanimity on the topic when the European Union’s 25 foreign ministers meet Monday.
Bush cautioned that the dust had yet to settle: Abbas, a relative moderate favored by the United States and Israel, remains as P.A. president, and Hamas — which appeared surprised by its victory — has yet to announce its plans for governance.
“We’d like him to stay in power,” Bush said of Abbas.
Yet the emerging consensus among Americans, U.S. Jewish leaders, Israelis and Palestinian moderates was that a Cabinet led by a Hamas prime minister fundamentally changes the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic — and not for the better.
“Tsunami,” said Diana Buttu, an adviser to Abbas until last year.
“An unmitigated disaster,” said David Makovsky, an analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Until Wednesday, the argument was whether Fatah would win an outright victory or whether it would have to include Hamas in government, and how the world should react. Some U.S. officials were discussing the model in Lebanon, where U.S. officials deal with all government ministers except the one representing Hezbollah, a group that, like Hamas, is on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups.
Instead, Hamas won 76 seats in the 132-member Parliament, compared to 43 for Fatah and 13 for smaller parties.
Makovsky said the United States would have to work hard to maintain the international consensus on isolating a Hamas-led government.
“The main event is to leverage aid and to make sure the U.S. is not alone,” Makovsky said Thursday in a conference call organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Such leverage would be potent because Hamas is about to inherit a Palestinian Authority on the verge of bankruptcy, the result of years of pervasive corruption and thieving by some Fatah leaders. It will be able to pay the P.A.’s 170,000 salaries — the mainstay of the Palestinian economy — only through the middle of February.
Isolating Hamas represents a spent formula, Buttu argued in a conference call organized by the Israel Policy Forum, a Jewish group that encourages greater U.S. involvement in the peace process. Instead, the West should try to moderate Hamas through offers of assistance, she said.
“The future is to bolster Abu Mazen and the voices that really want to see peace,” she said, using Abbas’ nom de guerre. The result of isolation “has been to bolster Hamas.”
Such arguments may be beside the point right now, said Samar Assad, who directs the Palestine Center, a Washington think tank. Hamas is unlikely to change decades of rejectionist ideology overnight, and in any case its most immediate concern is a society on the verge of collapse.
“They don’t want to come out and say to the people who voted for them that all of a sudden ‘we’re going to do a 180-degree turn,’ ” Assad said. “They will focus on a government and on domestic issues, and later, when they realize certain domestic issues can’t be accomplished without dealing with the reality of Israel, they will have to soften.”
At that point, the Europeans and the Bush administration might be readier to accommodate an arrangement. But that would encounter fierce resistance in Congress, which last month overwhelmingly passed legislation warning of financial consequences if Palestinians elect Hamas to government.
“I don’t think there’s any reasonable expectation that Hamas will change,” Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), a cosponsor of the legislation, told JTA. “There’s nothing Hamas has said or done that would give any hope whatsoever. The Palestinian people made their bed with Hamas, and now they can sleep with it.”
Congress exercises oversight over funds for the Palestinians, and another $200 million is available in addition to the $50 million Bush handed over last year. Bush used a national-security waiver to bypass Congress in that case, but he’s much less likely to exercise that option in dealing with a Hamas government.
U.S. Jewish groups, ranging from Americans for Peace Now to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, were virtually unanimous in pledging to maintain a political climate that would keep Hamas isolated.
Recognizing Israel’s right to exist and ending violence “should be a precondition for any direct international aid to the new Palestinian government,” Americans for Peace Now said. AIPAC had a similar message, calling on “the United States and its allies to uphold their policy of not dealing with Hamas and other terrorist groups.”
Stephen Cohen, a scholar who advises the Israel Policy Forum, said such views could be counterproductive.
“The danger of the American Jewish community is that it pays so much attention to the ideological stance of Palestinian movements,” said Cohen, who has met with Hamas figures. He recommended incremental steps.
“We have to make sure that American Jewry does not turn too much on the formal insistence of the change of the covenant,” Cohen said. That could lead to “years of conflict and armed struggle.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
