Weekend long read

Our weekly round-up of Middle East related background reading.

1) Khaled Abu Toameh discusses “The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah Connection“.

“Indications show that Iran and Hezbollah are also planning to extend their control to the Gaza Strip. Iran already provides Hamas with financial and military aid. It is precisely the support of Iran that has enabled Hamas to hold in power in the Gaza Strip for the past 10 years. It is also thanks to Iran that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another major terror group in the Gaza Strip, are in possession of thousands of missiles and rockets. It is Iranian money that allows Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to continue digging terror tunnels under the border with Israel.

Relations between Iran and Hamas have grown stronger in the past few weeks. Last month, a senior Hamas delegation visited Tehran to attend the funeral of the father of the senior Iranian security official, Qasem Soleimani. A few weeks earlier, another senior Hamas delegation visited Tehran to brief Iranian leaders on the latest developments surrounding the “reconciliation” agreement reached between Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA).”

2) Haviv Retting Gur analyses the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal.

“Hamas’s political leadership has spent the past 10 years attempting to prove that the movement was more than a narrowly conceived paramilitary organization. By 2017, its military wing, which took control of the organization with the rise of Yahya Sinwar in the last internal elections in February, had concluded that the attempt to expand Hamas’s agenda and vision beyond the narrow confines of its guerrilla war against Israel had become a trap, a distraction. It saddled the organization with the thankless monotonies and shackling responsibilities of civilian leadership. It was suddenly in charge of the economic wellbeing, health, education and safety of millions — and for what?

And so both sides in the reconciliation deal believe they are gaining something important. Fatah restores some of its lost privileges and powers after 10 long years of embarrassment in Gaza. Hamas sheds the distracting albatross of civilian rule that so diminished its standing and, many feel, set it up for failure.”

3) At MEMRI, Ze’ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin MK discusses “The Impossible Deal Of The Century“.

“Last year, adhering to the infamous PLO Charter, PLO Chairman ‘Abbas stated at the UN General Assembly (September 21, 2016): “The notorious Balfour Declaration in which Britain, without any right, authority or consent from anyone, gave the land of Palestine to another people. This paved the road to the Nakba of the Palestinian people and their dispossession and displacement from their land.”

The political significance of this statement is clear: Palestine was plundered from its sole legitimate owners, the Palestinian Arabs. In other words, the PLO cleaves to its fundamental ideological claim that the Palestinian Arabs enjoy the exclusive right to sovereignty in the whole of Palestine. Political recognition of Israel, such as in the Oslo Accords, or even declaring the acceptance of its “right to exist,” (but not as the nation state of the Jewish people,as categorically reaffirmed by Fatah’s Seventh Congress in 2016) do not contradict this ideology as long as this claim is being kept alive. Therefore, the PLO is unable – and indeed has refused – to sign a peace treaty with Israel that includes the essential “end of claims” declaration as long as a sovereign Jewish entity exists in Palestine.”

4) Those who missed Simon Schama’s Balfour Declaration centenary lecture at the Royal Society can find it here.

More from Hadar Sela
BBC WS radio tries to explain the ‘Lions’ Den’ – part one
Back in October of last year we observed that the BBC had...
Read More
Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *