To our brothers in Hamas and Islamic Jihad: partnership in sacrifice requires partnership in decision

By: Omar Shaban

In a special meeting organised by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements in Gaza just after the signing of the calming agreement in December 2012 in Gaza, with the attendance of many of the two movements' leaderships such as the brothers Khaled al-Batsh and Khalil al-Hayya and others, the meeting aimed at acquainting us with the conditions of the ceasefire. I summed up my position in that as follows: although the whole Gaza Strip was exposed to the Israeli aggression, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements confined the ceasefire negotiations and the calming conditions in Cairo — mediated by the deposed president Mohamed Morsi — to themselves alone, without any participation from Palestinian society, whether in the ceasefire or as relates to the calming conditions. And since the issues put forward for negotiation in this field are issues of an entangled nature, in which the regional and international political, the legal, the economic, and the linguistic interlace, dealing with them scientifically requires scientific, legal, and economic visions and important linguistic formulations — and political understanding alone does not suffice in such negotiations. Among these issues: 1) the legal status of the Gaza Strip, which international law still considers “occupied territory” despite the partial Israeli withdrawal from it in 2005 — whereby the Geneva Conventions oblige the occupying power, namely Israel, to care for and protect the population falling under its occupation, namely the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip; likewise the issue of the Rafah crossing and the 2005 agreement and the position of the multiple parties on it, the buffer zone and the permitted fishing zone, the crossings with Israel and the West Bank, and the guarantee of freedom of movement of goods and persons between Gaza and the West Bank as the Paris economic agreement of 1994 provided.

And in view of the negotiations' importance, and as is its habit, Israel brought to those negotiations a delegation composed of 26 experts specialised in multiple fields, among them: security, economy, environment, psychology, and specialists in the Arabic language and international law — while the negotiating Palestinian delegation was not of the same number or expertise, and was of the two movements' members only, as Palestinian experts were not called upon despite the extreme complication of those issues. I concluded my intervention by saying: one of the strategic aspects that must be taken into consideration is: how to prevent any new calming agreement from not being a final agreement such that the Palestinians are bound to infinity? And how to spare any new agreement from detracting from the previous agreements, which are in the first place deficient and incomplete agreements? This intervention met acceptance from the two movements' leaderships — without our knowing that we would face, after less than two years, another war and a second negotiation.

I apologise for mentioning the intervention with a kind of detail, but it suits the stage — as the Gaza Strip is subjected to the aggression a third time in seven years, and negotiations are now under way for a ceasefire that may result in a new truce agreement whose conditions we do not know how they will be! The state of intense polarisation in the region — whose cost the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip pay from the blood of their sons and from their possessions and their future — requires, more than before, the involvement of Palestinian experts, especially from outside the homeland, of the specialists in international law and international politics, those acquainted with the previous agreements with Israel, and those widely acquainted with the corridors of Western politics in general and American in particular. That will work, should it be applied, to guarantee the realisation of better conditions for the Palestinian side and to limit the effect of the state of tension between Hamas and Egypt and the state of polarisation in the region on the negotiations' course. More important than that, such participation will give strong proof that Palestinian society in its entirety has contributed to its drafting — which will form a communal immunity for it and will reduce the responsibility of Hamas and Jihad should that agreement fail.

With my conviction that the two movements' leaderships, in coordination with the Palestinian presidency, work sincerely to realise an honourable ceasefire, and that their conditions for the ceasefire are conditions that touch the ambitions and hopes of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and all the Palestinians, I call on the two movements' leaderships to work by all ways and means — despite the situation's difficulty — to communicate with the strata of Palestinian society inside and in the diaspora, of youth, women, and experts in the various fields, to benefit from their opinions; and if their actual participation is difficult, to work by various means to elicit the opinion of the street, especially in the Gaza Strip, about the calming and its conditions. The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip — as they live this war with its cruelty that exceeds description and endurance, and as they watch with their own eyes their families being killed and their houses being destroyed, and the tens of thousands of citizens who left their houses in the middle of the night and in light of the electricity's cutting — have every right to offer their opinions. One of the most important causes of the achievement the resistance realises is the people's rallying around it and their readiness to sacrifice the precious and the cheap for the sake of deliverance from the blockade that was killing them silently and slowly. Partnership in sacrifice requires partnership in decision.