Notwithstanding Hamas’s recent success at partially overwhelming Iron Dome, it has failed to accomplish one of its signal goals: nothing it has done has succeeded in galvanizing the Arab population in Ramallah and Hebron to rise up against either Israel or the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Though written in May 2017, Paul Rivlin, a Moshe Dayan Center researcher analyzes a rich trove of data to analyze the Gaza Strip’s troubling economic character. Five major reasons are enumerated for its dilemmas: absence of investment, extraordinary high unemployment, a very young population, inability of goods and services to go in and out of the strip, and Hamas’s stranglehold on taxation and spending.
Hamas has long sought to stymie Egyptian control over the peninsula and keep its weapons smuggling routes open, but its latest opportunistic gamble on local jihadists carries wider dangers that should be nipped in the bud by sponsors Turkey and Qatar.
There is a major, and unfounded, underlying assumption behinds calls for Israel to accept Hamas’s conditions: that Hamas is genuinely motivated by its responsibility for the welfare of Gazans.
Should the United States become centrally or peripherally involved in monitoring a cease-fire and the movement of a cease-fire into a new status-quo for Gaza, the contents of this MOU could constitute a workable outline for helping enforce calm in Gaza and on its borders.
“The Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace: Israel’s Disengagement from the Gaza Strip: Precedents, Motivations and Outcomes” Zionism Fulfilled.- Israel’s preemptive physical disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was the result of a national consensus;…
The rise of Hamas marks a shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a struggle between national movements or states to a battle between religions, making a resolution all the more difficult to achieve.
Hamas absolutely opposes Israel’s right to exist, with its leadership repeatedly declaring that all of Palestine belongs to Moslems.
