The Mecca Agreement

          To these ends, the Mecca deal sets the terms for a Palestinian national unity government in which Hamas and Fatah will each hold an equal number of cabinet ministries, with Hamas retaining the prime ministry.  This may well curb internal Palestinian strife, but Hamas has done little to bring back foreign aid, besides accepting the legitimacy afforded by participating in a coalition government – it accepts none of the Quartet’s three conditions in full.  Hamas agrees to “respect” previous agreements with Israel, but not to actually “adhere to” them – and outright rejects recognizing, or renouncing violence against, Israel.

Terms of Debate

          In response to the Mecca deal, Israel must choose whether to continue to push for economically isolating the PA.  Israeli analysts have examined the choice on several levels: Ron Ben-Yishai, writing for the prominent Israeli newspaper Yediot Acharonot, emphasized the security benefits of a Fatah-Hamas truce which would strengthen the PA against Iranian, Hizbullah, and al-Qaeda infiltration.  Further, while Hamas may exploit a lull in intra-Palestinian fighting to build up “its new military infrastructure in [Gaza],” it already is creating a network of tunnels and arms smuggling.”[1]

          Gidi Greenstein, an analyst at the same paper, outlined the underlying contradictory Israeli goals which led Ben-Yishai to recommend foiling Iranian and al-Qaeda infiltration by propping up Hamas: on the one hand, Israel does not want to talk to the PA until Hamas moderates.  But on the other hand, it cannot talk to a weakened Fatah, and most importantly, it wants to avoid a humanitarian crisis in the PA territories.  The collapse of the Hamas-led PA, claimed Greenstein, “will hold strategic implications that would dwarf the…fallout of the last Lebanon war,” creating an “existential threat to Israel’s ability to guarantee its future as a Jewish and democratic state.”[2]

          But why should this be the case?  Should policymakers so deeply tie Palestinian welfare to Israeli welfare?  It is this assumption which underlies the debate on Israeli options in Mecca’s aftermath.  Determining which policy Israel should adopt requires understanding why this assumption is wrong – which can be done only by investigating the nature of government, in general, and of foreign policy, in particular.

The Argument

          Government is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.  Its authority derives from citizens pooling their individual rights to self-defense – each citizen delegates his right to self-defense to his government.  While he retains certain civic liberties, he surrenders his right to conduct a private foreign policy – and certainly to prosecute a private war.  In the face of foreign aggression, then, the citizen has no defense but his government.

          So as long as that government is to remain a government, in the sense I’ve just outlined, it has not only the option but the obligation to repel foreign attacks and eliminate external threats to its citizens’ rights – with no more moral or legal latitude to strike a compromise with foreign aggressors than it has to appease domestic criminals.

          To claim that any government should concern itself with the welfare of a population whose democratically-elected representatives refuse to renounce violence against it, then, is to grossly misunderstand the nature of government:

          In the case at hand, Israel does not exist to protect the Palestinians.  In the first place, their welfare should play no part in Israeli government deliberations.  In the second place, Israel does exist to protect the Israelis, whose rights Hamas has violated in the past and threatens in the present – and therefore should neutralize Hamas, disregarding the cost to the Palestinian populace.

          Israel’s passive economic isolation of the PA reflects this goal – which it eventually may need to meet in other, more active, ways.  If the PA’s collapse drives a desperate Hamas to launch a major terrorism campaign against Israel – or if more virulent Iranian or al-Qaeda forces infiltrate anarchical PA territories – then Israel should take the active military steps needed to eradicate their presence.

Reinforcing the Argument

          Hamas may declare that its Islamist ideology sanctions coexistence with a Jewish population under Muslim sovereignty.  But it is not purely as Jews that most Israelis wish to live – they want also to be citizens of a Jewish state.  They want to pool their rights of self-defense, in a region where they are geographically concentrated, to live under their own government.  The wisdom of this choice may be contested; their right to make the choice may not – it stems from their rights as individuals.

          The Palestinians possess the same right, and it is this logic which supports a two-state solution to their conflict with Israel – in short, squaring two mirror-image rights.  But they may not deprive Israel of this same right – Hamas does not have the right to attack Israel for existing, yet it refuses to disavow this aim in the Mecca agreement.

          As a result, a Hamas-led PA should lose whatever governing rights and capacities that Israel needs to destroy in order to punish the violence and eliminate the threat that Hamas imposes upon Israeli citizens – just as a criminal who commits an imprisonable offense forfeits his own freedom of movement.  And as a criminal who initiates a shootout with police is responsible for any harm done to civilian bystanders – so any harm done to Palestinian civilians by Israeli policy is the fault of a Hamas decision to violate Israeli citizens’ rights.

          Would such a policy display much mercy toward the Palestinian population?  No.  But would it be just, in the strictest sense of the word?  Absolutely.  The Palestinians, as a whole, may suffer as a result of their leaders’ misdeeds.  But there is no reason for Israel to share in their suffering.  Its right to exist is not contingent on Palestinian happiness – instead, its obligation to defend its citizens’ rights is absolute.

Nota Bene

          My underlying message is that Israel should not try to amorally “manage” its relations with the Palestinians – it should not try to balance one faction against another, or select the lesser of two evils between which world opinion wants it to choose.  It should deal with its problems directly, building policy on the core tenet that government exists to defend its citizens, not to make them popular abroad.