The Flaw in the Truce Negotiations

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

If we listen to a great many Palestinian political analysts and leaders of Palestinian factions, we find them unanimous that Israel does not honor any truce, covenant, or pledge, and that it is an aggressive, belligerent state that never stops striking the Palestinian people wherever they are. Yet whenever the subject of a truce arises, and the possibility of concluding a written or unwritten agreement about it, we find these very same people going along with it, if to varying degrees. There is a firm conviction about Israel’s aggressiveness and its continuing aggression, alongside practical conduct that contradicts this conviction; and this in itself places the Palestinian person in a state of inner conflict: do we negotiate with Israel despite its aggressiveness, or must we turn our backs on the very idea of negotiations and of truces?

The historical experience

The Palestinian factions tried verbal truce arrangements in southern Lebanon, and each time Israel violated the agreement because it always believes it has the security justification that calls for striking the Palestinians. The ideas of truce and calm in Lebanon ended in the 1982 war and the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon. Hezbollah tried a truce with Israel, especially in the April Understanding, but Israel would not honor it, and continued its assaults on Lebanon and on Hezbollah. The Palestinian factions tried a truce in 2005, but Israel declared it was not a party to it, and continued striking as it pleased. The 2008 truce experience was no better, as Israel did not respect the factions’ halt in rocket fire.

The historical experience is clear, and understanding it requires little effort. Israel considers that it has the right to defend itself according to its own concept of security, regardless of any agreements, and it sees others as the aggressors while it is the meek lamb. To Israel, others are the terrorists, while it is the bearer of the message of peace and love. Its assaults are justified and legitimate, while others’ self-defense amounts to a crime.

The error of negotiating with Israel

Nations negotiate, and negotiation is a means of arriving at solutions to various issues; but negotiating with Israel is a special case, in that the enemy occupies the land, displaces the people, and continues killing and destruction. Israel leaves no means of aggression unused against the Palestinian people, and it constantly invents and devises new methods to inflict the greatest possible harm on them. Beyond that, it does not recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people — rights that are the very opposite of its own existence — even as it recognizes certain civil rights.

The Palestinian people are still in the phase of seeking strength, and the day has not yet come when the Palestinian people can exercise their right to jihad and struggle at the very same time they might go to the negotiating table. The negotiating table — for anything beyond incidental matters, whether direct or indirect, whether for a truce or for establishing a state — needs strength in order to have any meaning, and that strength does not currently exist. The stage of negotiations does not arrive until the enemy has become convinced that conceding Palestinian rights is better for it than continuing to pursue the Palestinians. Until that point is reached, the Palestinian people have long nights ahead of them in which to stay up, work, produce, train, and organize.

By “incidental negotiations” I mean those negotiations aimed at resolving a limited problem, separate from the cause as a whole, such as prisoner-exchange negotiations or providing for people’s daily needs. But negotiations that fall within the overall thinking of the resistance, or that concern resolving the Palestinian cause as a whole, are structural negotiations — negotiations that signal recognition of Israel.

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…a means for establishing the truce. Negotiations now carry within them an implicit or explicit principle: relinquishing Palestinian rights, or at the very least recognizing the enemy.

Hamas and the Palestinian resistance factions have fallen into the very same error the PLO fell into, and one would hope that a person, or a faction, would always try to learn from past mistakes. Indirect negotiations amount to recognition of the enemy; they are a major psychological step in the direction of accepting the enemy, and of raising the level of negotiations in the future. Islamic Jihad falls into the same error, even though its rhetoric differs somewhat from that of the other factions.

Negotiations with an intelligence chief

Another error the Palestinian factions commit lies in relying on Egypt as a mediator between them and Israel, and relying on intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as the axis of the negotiating process. Egypt is an Arab state that recognizes Israel, and has long since removed itself entirely from the circle of the conflict, while the Egyptian regime spares no effort to drag all the Arabs into its own political trench. The Egyptian regime seeks to accept Israel’s existence, to search for a solution to the refugee issue through resettlement, and to establish a Palestinian entity acting as a security agent for Israel. Negotiating through it is a mistake, and the mistake could have been less severe had the factions sought a foreign state to serve as mediator instead.

The mistake deepens further when an Arab intelligence chief becomes the link and the face of the process. Arab intelligence chiefs are degraded men who have devoted their efforts and their work to hunting down the Arab individual and destroying and erasing his personality. Arabs’ experiences with Arab intelligence agencies are bitter and repugnant, and we all know that no one joins the ranks of the intelligence services except those who have already decided to stand against their own nation and to become tools of the ruler. Omar Suleiman, an intelligence chief who pursues Egypt’s free men, is, I do not think, someone genuinely concerned with the freedom of the sons of Palestine.

Dragging the man’s foot

If you ask who is responsible for the daily suffering of the people of Gaza, some say it is the occupation, others say it is Hamas. Israel pressures people in order to place responsibility for the constricted life in the Strip on Hamas, and in order to stir people up against it and bring it down. And in order to relieve people’s burden, Hamas continually searches for the means and methods it can adopt to ease the people’s condition. In other words, Hamas is compelled to make concessions, such as reaching a truce, in order to relieve daily suffering.

Today people’s burden can be eased through a truce — but what of tomorrow? Tomorrow Israel will raise the price, and its demands in exchange for supplying people with food will rise as well. The West Bank stands before us as a glaring example, where the Palestinian Authority intensifies its security measures against its own people’s sons for the sake of a salary. Will Hamas follow the very same path, and arrive in the end at the very same result? It is essential to think about how to get out before the foot sinks in any further.

Self-directed calm

We are in the phase of liberation, and it is for the resistance to decide when to advance and when to hold back, according to what it sees as serving its people’s interest, and according to its own capabilities. It is for the resistance to continually assess matters and evaluate them, and then arrange its future moves accordingly. If it sees the necessity of a lull, it should bring that about without indirect negotiation with the enemy, and it should raise the level of its resistance if it finds the objective and subjective conditions favorable. In order for the factions to be effective and precise, the following is required:

Forming a joint factional operations room, with a unified, secret command, in a secret location, to direct the resistance. The joint operations room would rest on scientific and professional foundations, would strip each faction of the freedom to make decisions unilaterally, and would reduce the degree of one-upmanship among the factions.

Forming a non-factional administration in the Gaza Strip, responsible for running people’s civil and daily life, separate from military, security, and political activity. The goal is to keep people’s civil life as far removed as possible from the resistance’s activities. This spares the factions the sin of entering into indirect negotiations with the enemy, and leaves administrators free to search for ways of securing people’s daily needs. Combining administration with resistance is a mistake that must be corrected.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الخلل في مفاوضات التهدئة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.