The death of Border Policeman Barel Hadaria Shmueli after he was seriously wounded by shots fired by a Hamas member on the Gaza Strip border is not merely the reflection of a tactical error by the IDF, but of a perverted strategy. Israel, like the US in the Iran context, longs to work things out with Hamas. And like the Americans', this too is a wish that hides a mistaken reading of Hamas under Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar that echoes the Israeli failure to understand Yasser Arafat's Fatah or PLO.
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In 1991, Israel adopted the view of reaching a "political agreement." The assumption, which turned out to be incorrect, was that adopting the consensus of "territory for peace" would completely erode the Palestinian belligerence.
The collapse of the "Oslo process" due to the Second Intifada, which erupted after Arafat rejected Israel's generous offer for a permanent peace deal and backed violence against Israel, illustrated that the Palestinian national movement never saw the conflict in the classic terms of a political agreement to be reached through a compromise on territory, but rather as a long-term battle to ultimately defeat Zionism.
Nearly 30 years after the peace process fell apart, Israel is still insisting on repeating the exact same mistake, this time with the Islamist resistance movement in the Gaza Strip – Hamas. This time, the prospect of a political agreement will be replaced by the prospect of a long-term economic "arrangement" that is based on adjusting the idea of security in exchange for territory into a concept of security in exchange for an economy and the partial release of the "blockade" on Gaza.
In recent years, this outlook has become a bedrock of Israel's policy on the Gaza Strip. It dovetails with Israel's disinclination to wage a military operation in Gaza. Israel has clung to it so closely that it has tended to blindly view Hamas' continued terrorism as "rogue" acts that do not represent the organization's official line, the birth pangs that go along with the movement coming on line with a long-term "arrangement" (hudna, or truce) that supposedly includes a willingness to thoroughly contain terrorist acts.
Even the latest round of hostilities with Hamas in May did not do anything to change Israel's view. The opposite. It anchored the assumption that after the fighting, it was time for a long-term arrangement. There was no understanding that like with Arafat's PLO-Fatah, which in the name of the eternal principle of the conflict was never willing to end it and mixed violence with any dialogue, Hamas sees its own strategy in terms of a reality that combines negotiations an terrorism. This is the strategy of "both" (an agreement and resistance) that characterizes Iran (which wants talks with the US and also nuclear weapons), and is the opposite of the Israeli strategy, which is based on an "either-or" model – conflict, or a deal.
The lesson history can teach us lies not only in the fact that there is no real difference between the secular PLO-Fatah and the Islamist Hamas, but also the insight that Israel tens to repeat the mistake of projecting western thinking onto its opponents, not to mention the fact that political victimization is not a matter of fate.
Once we are past the delusion of a long-term political agreement or arrangement, it will be possible to wake up from the idea of an economic arrangement, or at least recognize the act that such an arrangement does not necessarily guarantee a reality of quiet on the security front.
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