If they are to end the occupation and build a sovereign state, the Palestinians need to engage diverse means of resistance, such as campaigns of civil disobedience and popular uprisings, rather than just armed resistance. Hamas has grown accustomed to engaging in armed confrontations and it believes that its approach is the only required form of resistance. But its actions have done nothing to alter the balance of power between the Israelis and Palestinians, or to force Israel to halt settlement expansion and commit to international law and UN resolutions. At the same time, the international community and the US have given nothing to the moderate Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by Mahmoud Abbas. The PA opposes the targeting of Israeli civilians and does not practice militant resistance, in the hope that diplomacy and political pressure will bring a solution. This failure to reward the PA for its position is one of the grim ironies of the Palestinian situation. Certainly, a diplomatic solution remains elusive as Israel continues to expand its settlements, abuse the principles of international law, and continue its occupation of Palestinian territory undeterred. The fact is that the Israeli aggression against Gaza and the Palestinian people is a repetitive phenomenon. That Hamas and other Arab regimes have failed to deter Israel is also a repetitive phenomenon that reflects a profound crisis in the structure of the Arab order and the state of weakness that has claimed both moderates and militants. It should be added that the latter are more to blame as they claim to be spearheading a resistance while forcing innocent civilians to pay the price and without accomplishing the stated objectives of resistance. Without a doubt, Egypt's handling of the resistance in Palestine has been affected by the division in the country following the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government. Most Muslim Brotherhood supporters have projected their opposition to the new order in Egypt on the Palestinian question, rendering Hamas the victim, from their perspective, not of its mistakes and Israeli belligerency but of the Egyptian initiative that they had regarded as collusion with Israel, although they came around to accepting its substance recently. However, any discussion of the resistance must go beyond the stance toward Hamas and probe the experiences of failure registered by the modes of armed resistance espoused by Arab regimes and political factions. Apart from the Egyptian-Arab victory in the 1973 war and the success of Hizbullah (when it was an active resistance force) in liberating South Lebanon from the Israeli occupation in 2000, all military confrontations between the Arabs and Israel, ever since Saddam Hussein fired missiles against Tel Aviv following his occupation of Kuwait in a bid to win the support of the Arab street and to cover up his crime of occupying another Arab state, have ended in resounding failure. Hizbullah managed to withstand the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that followed Hizbullah's missile attacks against Israel in 2006, until UN forces intervened between the two sides. Afterwards, Hizbullah stopped engaging in military confrontation with Israel and turned its attention to settling sectarian scores in Syria. Hamas is repeating the same scenario. Its first military adventure began 19 December 2008 when members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad fired some primitive rockets into parts of southern Israel. Israel, in turn, responded with an assault against Gaza that killed 1,417 Palestinians (of whom 926 were civilians, 412 children and 111 women) and wounded 4,336 others. Ten Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians were killed in the hostilities. The Hamas rocket experiment followed its seizure of control over Gaza through a military drive in which it killed, expelled and arrested many members of the Fatah faction. This signifies that the domestic front that embraces the resistance project did not fully support Hamas, even if it was felt necessary to display unity of ranks in the face of the Israeli war machine. Hamas repeated the same approach in the current battle after it was accused of complicity in the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli settlers. Again, Israel launched a full-scale assault against Gaza, this time killing around 2,000 Palestinians while losing about 60 soldiers from its own ranks. While armed resistance is one of the options legitimately available to a people under occupation, surely that option should be left until all other means of asserting diplomatic, political and mass (in the form of popular uprisings) pressure are exhausted. When all such options fail, as has been the case due to Israeli arrogance, then it is crucial to forge a domestic, regional and (if possible) international consensus before seeking recourse to the option of armed resistance. There must be a cohesive domestic front that supports the armed resistance option and that is capable of accomplishing gains for the Palestinian cause and not for a particular faction, as is the case now. The process of building a new future for the resistance in Palestine begins with supporting a national unity government, reinstating the PA in Gaza, ending the project for a Muslim Brotherhood emirate, and putting the West Bank and Gaza on the same track. Also, before exploring the option of armed resistance, the resistance factions have to stop resolving their disputes by force of arms and establish a mode of organisation that respects diversity and respects the Palestinian people, which means that the people are foremost in mind when calculating the risks before firing a single rocket against Israel. Only then will armed resistance become an option for a people and nation, rather than an instrument plied in accordance with factional calculations. The writer is a political analyst in Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and a former MP.
