Interesting dispatch from Gaza City from Edmund Sanders in the LA Times:

Hamas, the Palestinian faction viewed by many in the West as a nest of terrorists and Islamic hard-liners, is battling a curious new epithet: moderate.

Fifteen months after a punishing Israeli offensive failed to dislodge Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, rival resistance groups and some former supporters say the organization has become too political, too secular and too soft.

“People in the street say Hamas has changed,” said Abu Ahmed, spokesman for the military wing of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian armed group in Gaza that complained recently that Hamas had arrested four of its militants as they tried to attack Israeli soldiers near the border. “They’re paying a price for that. People need to know that Hamas is still committed to the resistance.”

I’ll take that as evidence that more efforts should have been made to engage Hamas’ leadership, rather than the pursuit of this isolation strategy. Leaders of movements tend to find it to be in their interest to moderate in exchange for a slice of meaningful power. The US-Israeli concept has been that if we act in a punitive way toward Hamas-controlled Gaza, that Palestinian opinion will magically become more moderate but the real consequences are likely to be the reverse.

Steve Erlanger writes for The New York Times about the difficulties of forging a Palestinian unity government with which one could negotiate:

“This is a moment of very tough choices, with no dominant approach with obvious advantages,” said Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut Institute, a policy research group in Tel Aviv. “Obama is being pushed to go for a Palestinian national unity government, negotiations and a comprehensive settlement. But it would be a mistake to push the two-state solution toward a moment of truth when it is in a moment of weakness, and when there is both a civil war and a deep constitutional crisis on the Palestinian side.”

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even some in Israel favor a national unity government that would enable the Palestinian Authority to be seen as at least notionally in charge of the rebuilding in Gaza. But even if the antipathies between Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank, could be overcome, a deal would almost certainly entail early elections that Fatah might very well lose.

The Gaza war has been bad for Fatah, and its popularity is plunging. Hamas is feeling victorious after surviving the Israeli pounding and is unlikely to allow Fatah to restore its presence, even for an election, in an angry Gaza.

This is a pretty neat trick. Israel launches a war in Gaza that’s allegedly supposed to weaken Hamas. Then Israel declares victory, even though the war has in fact strengthened Hamas and weakened Fatah. Then thanks to Fatah’s weakened position, it’s impossible to forge a unity government. But absent a unity government, it’s unreasonable for Israel to negotiate—Q.E.D.! It puts one in a mind of the time when it was impossible with Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it was run by a corrupt and incompetent Fatah. No negotiations until political reform! Then when the elections were held, it turned out that the opposition—Hamas—won. And then Israel couldn’t negotiate with Hamas!

Taken in isolation, each of these positions has a patina of reasonableness but the overall pattern is of a government that’s much more interested in finding reasons to forever-forestall negotiations—expanding settlements all the while—than in finding a route to peace.

Just as you can apparently be hailed as a brilliant reporter for peddling bogus conspiracy theories about Iraqi links to al-Qaeda, it seems that stringing together random nutty quotes from Hamas figures to draw the conclusion that Hamas is an organization of unappeasable madmen now counts as brilliant analysis. But of course the problem with this sort of thing—and precisely parallel efforts with regard to Iranian leaders or Hezbollah leaders or whomever else—is that when you look at the record as a whole it turns out that people say all kinds of things. Yesterday, for example, Israel killed a senior Hamas guy named Said Sayyam who was prone to saying stuff like this:

The air strike on Sayyam was apparently an attempt by Israel to deliver an image of victory in its offensive against Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces understands that Hamas’ agreement in principle to the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza signals that the campaign is nearing its end.

In an interview with Haaretz in November 1995, Sayyam said, “I do not hate [Israelis] for being Jewish or Israeli but because of what they have done to us. Because of the acts of occupation.”

In response to a question about whether he saw a chance for change in relations between Palestinians and Israelis, he said, “It is difficult to forget what was done to us. If the reason for the hate will not exist, everything is possible.”

Now what’s the “real” Hamas here? Honestly, I have no idea. I have no idea how it is that people reach such firm conclusion about who it is and isn’t possible to negotiate with. I think the record of history is simply that these things are very uncertain. If you look, for example, at the series of events from the Anglo-Irish War through the Irish Civil War and the Irish Free State era, I don’t really know how anyone would have predicted in advance which people would turn out to be the irreconcilables and which would turn out to be open to compromise.

Jeffrey Goldberg had a piece on Hamas in yesterday’s New York Times that Noam Scheiber hailed as “hands down the best thing I’ve read since the Gaza conflict started.” Jon Chait deemed it “fantastic” and recommended this conclusion especially:

The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.

I wasn’t that big a fan of the piece, analytically, though it certainly is admirably witty. But be that as it may, it would certainly be desirable to see the more practical crew running Fatah having more support and control over the situation. But Israel’s attacks on Gaza are causing the reverse to happen just as the war in Lebanon 30 months ago had that effect. And, indeed, how Israel’s settlement expansions and growing network of roadblocks and special highways crossing the West Bank are weakening Fatah and the forces of Palestinian moderation. And of course recall that it was deliberate Israeli—and American—policy to weaken Fatah for years after the collapse of the Camp David talks. This “help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah” strategy is fine but it needs to be backed up by real steps. And the United States probably needs to take the lead since the Israeli political dynamic has become myopically focused on short-term issues. A president willing to demand a real freeze on settlement activity would be a great first step.

One interesting issue in the current crisis is how come Hezbollah hasn’t acted aggressively to start up a second front in the north while the IDF is conducting major operations in Gaza. Abu Muquwama has some plausible sounding speculations about this. One could, I think, probably construct other scenarios. Part of the reason is almost certainly just status quo bias and inertia — on any given day, Hezbollah has a strong presumption against undertaking a dramatic escalation of the conflict with Israel.

But note that while one can adduce all kinds of reasons to explain Hezbollah’s actions, none of them are consistent with the (apparently popular in Israel as well as among US neocons) line of thinking which holds that both Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing more than puppets of Iran and extensions of Tehran’s relentless drive to eradicate Israel.