After the group stormed southern Israel in a brutal assault last week, what impact does it have on its popularity among Palestinians?
Easily breaching supposedly impenetrable Israeli defenses and encountering little Israeli military resistance, Hamas beseiged numerous communities and killed at least 800 Israelis, most of them civilians. They spirited dozens of military prisoners and civilian hostages into Gaza on motorcycles, in golf carts and even on foot. It was the most devastating surprise assault in Israel in over 50 years and unprecedented in its impact on its sense of stability and security.
Hamas’ big break came with the brutal second intifada–or uprising–which began after the failure of the 2000 Camp David peace talks summit. By the fall of 2000, although PLO negotiations with Israel were continuing, Hamas began introducing both religious themes into the “Al-Aqsa intifada,” forcing Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to use such religious terminology that was very foreign to the PLO.
Hamas’ popularity is hard to gauge. Like other Arab Islamist groups, they tend to do better in legislative elections than all-or-nothing presidential balloting. It’s likely that something like 25-35% of Palestinians are sympathetic to their Islamist social agenda. In parliamentary elections, they been able to add another 10% or so that seems to sympathize with their “armed struggle until victory” rhetoric or wanted to protest Fatah corruption and mismanagement.
Israelis are now awakened to the fact that they are still in a brutal and existential conflict with the Palestinians. The Palestinians living under occupation in Gaza, which Israel rules from the outside, controlling the coastal waters, the airspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and all of the crossings, except one small crossing controlled by Egypt, have been living in a kind of open-air prison run by especially vicious inmates for two decades.
With bodies littering the streets of southern Israel and dozens spirited off to Gaza to serve as bargaining chips or human shields , Israelis have been brutally jolted awake. Their self-induced slumber is over. Hamas is unlikely to ever apologize, but it might suffer a similar backlash depending on what happens. The biggest mistake Israel could make would be directly re-occupying the Gaza Strip. That might be tempting under the rubric of not allowing Hamas to continue to run the territory and pose the threat of a repetition of the attack. But it would create a virtual abattoir for Israeli conscripts, who would be picked off by guerrilla forces in Gaza, most notably a resurgent Hamas.
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