Quick reminder of who Hamas is ... There are two physically separated areas where the Palestinians live: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The West Bank (of the Jordan river) lies between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan in the Jordan River valley. It has some fertile agricultural land, a relatively well educated population, some developed cities such as Ramallah, and a small manufacturing base. The Gaza Strip is a narrow sliver of land on the Sinai peninsula between Israel and Egypt. Gaza City is the largest city but other significant areas include Rafah and several refugee camps. Rafah has been a center of trade and commerce for centuries. The Gaza Strip was created by the 1948 armistice between Israel and Egypt and occupied by Israel in the Six Day war of 1967 Egypt regained control in 1973. When the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt set formal boundaries, the border split the city of Rafah in half.
When the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, established the Palestinian Authority, a government with headquarters in Ramallah (West Bank), there was another Palestinian movement already rooted in the Gaza Strip. Hamas had developed out of the Muslim Brotherhood and become the leading source of charity, health care and even education for the residents of Gaza City, especially the poor.
Attempts by the dominant political faction in the West Bank and Palestinian Authority, Fatah, to establish the government’s control over Gaza ran into local resistance. When Palestinians voted in legislative elections in 2006, Fatah easily won in the West Bank but Hamas surprised most observers by winning a large majority of parliamentary seats in Gaza.
Hamas is a self-defined hard line Islamist party whose leaders have been noted for piety, Koranic knowledge, and a public refusal to acknowledge Israel but not political or administrative skills. The majority of Gazans are not Islamists, nor in favor of a socially conservative, restrictive government and more interested in economic development than an aggressive stance toward Israel, so one might ask, “What were they thinking?”
I think you can understand Hamas victory in 2006 as a neat case of strategic voting gone badly awry. The Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority officials and bureaucrats in Gaza were notorious for being high handedly dictatorial and seriously corrupt. It is plausible to think that many people in Gaza felt that they did not want a Hamas led government but they wanted to send a message to the folks in Ramallah to stop the stealing and pay attention to the needs of the people. Since they assumed that Fatah would win the election, they felt free to vote for Hamas as a protest against the bad behavior of Fatah ... and enough people made that calculation so that they ended up electing Hamas. A year later tension between Fatah in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza erupted into civil war and the Palestinian Authority was kicked out of Gaza. Technically the government in Ramallah is the government of Gaza, too, but the reality is different.
In the past 6 years Hamas has been unable to improve the economic condition of the people of Gaza, has tried to impose unpopular social restrictions and allowed private militias and various radical groups to proliferate. Hamas’ unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to control small bands bent on violence lead to a series of short range rocket attacks on Israeli towns within a few miles of the border. The result was the 2008-9 military operation code named “Cast Lead” that saw massive Israeli air power and a punishing ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. After inflicting serious casualties on both armed groups and ordinary civilians and substantial damage to both government and private buildings, the Israelis withdraw under international pressure and instituted a stringent blockade on the Gaza Strip. Hamas rule has become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive. A key factor in the economic stagnation in Gaza and the increasing frustration of the people has been the Israeli blockade of the territory, which has made importing and exporting almost everything -- including medicine and fuel oil to power electrical generators-- nearly impossible. In light of growing international pressure to deal with the hardships caused by the blockade, the government of Israel has begun to allow some material into Gaza.
Far more important than the trickle of goods allowed in by Israel has been the elaborate and sophisticated smuggling networks that have grown up in Gaza, featuring tunnels deep beneath the desert running from the city of Rafah in Gaza into the Sinai desert. After the 2006 Hamas electoral victory Israel imposed a blockade of the few border crossings into Gaza and restrictions on the use of the waters off the coast of Gaza. These restrictions were tightened even further after the 2008-9 violence. For reasons of its own, Egypt has cooperated with the Israeli blockade and closed the crossing at Rafah. In response, enterprising Gazans have dug a series of tunnels from their side of Rafah under the border into Egypt. Despite periodic raids by the Israeli air force to bomb tunnels and the dangers of cave ins from haphazard construction , the tunnels have made life in Gaza bearable. In addition to food, fuel and building materials, smugglers have done a brisk trade in weapons, especially the short range devices that can be launched by a couple of people and aimed in the general direction of Israeli settlements. In the past few weeks the arsenals have included rockets made in Iran that have a 40 mile range and are able to reach Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Israel has had a difficult enough time negotiating with Arafat and then his successor in the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas has repeatedly denied Israel’s right to exist and supported violence such as rocket attacks on civilians. The U.S. and most of Western Europe have followed Israel’s lead and declared Hamas a “terrorist” organization. While “terrorist” is as much as political term for people you really dislike as it is a term with an explicit empirical basis, the word has political and legal consequences. A major one is that governments resolutely claim they don’t negotiate with terrorists and U.S. law prohibits American citizens and diplomats from dealing with terrorist organizations.
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