Dr. Jonathan Shanzer

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dr. Jonathan Shanzer joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as vice president of research in 2010.  Previously, he worked as a terrorism finance expert at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and for several U.S.-based think tanks including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Jewish Policy Center, and the Middle East Forum. The author of “Hamas v Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine” (2008), he studied Middle East history in four countries and earned his PhD from King’s College in London. Shanzer has testified before Congress and publishes widely in international and national media.
Recently, he spoke with reporters about the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, and its impact on the peace process and Palestinian statehood just days before the two sides signed a “peace pact” in Egypt. The conference call interview was organized by The Israel Project, an international non-profit organization that provides journalists with information regarding the Middle East.

Can you fill us in on the background of the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation?
A: The Hamas-Fatah divide really began in 1998 in the immediate aftermath of the intifada. It was about the time that Yasser Arafat was based in Tunisia. When the Hamas organization was spawned it posed an instant challenge to Arafat’s Fatah faction, primarily because it was a new group and Fatah until then was really the only party that made decisions within the PLO. The challenge was deepened after Arafat took part in that famous handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, signifying the official launch of the official peace process with Israel. While Arafat was never fully committed to that peace process,  Hamas was fully against it and challenged him at every turn. Arafat realized that he probably could not compete with Hamas given the fact that it had gotten very popular from its suicide bombing campaigns and, ultimately, this is what led him to reject the peace plan that was offered him by Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001. By the time Yasser Arafat died in 2004, it was really not clear which faction was in fact more dominant in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  It became more challenging to tell which faction controlled what areas within the territories. So, by the time the elections rolled around in 2006, Hamas felt strong enough to compete in them and, in fact, those elections led to a resounding Hamas victory over the Fatah faction.
What happened after that was a power struggle between those two factions.  Fatah refused to relinquish full control and was supported by the West, not the least of which were the U.S. and Israel who were fearful of letting Hamas into the government given the organization’s history of violence and suicide bombings.  Ultimately, this stance led to a war that took place in 2007.  Within about a week Hamas was able to take the entire Gaza Strip under control.  And since then we’ve been in a deadlock.  The Hamas vs Fatah scenario is one in which Hamas has maintained full control over the Gaza Strip – we call it Hamasistan or Gazastan – and on the other side you have Fatahland or West Bankistan.  The two have operated under two different government with two different funding sources; two different foreign policies, etc.  In fact, we were looking not at a two-state solution for the last several years but what could be looked at as a three-state solution.
Nothing has changed really over those three years until right now. Every attempt to mediate this dispute between these two factions has failed – whether it was the Arab League, the Egyptians, the Turks, the Saudis, the Mauritanians – they’ve all tried to intervene and each time their attempts at reconciliation have fallen apart.

Why is this peace pact between these two warring factions happening now?
A:  This really stems from the initiative that was launched by Mahmoud Abbad, the president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the Fatah party.  In 2005, he met with the president of Brazil and the two began talking about how the Palestinians might be able to gain recognition at the U.N. through the General Assembly for a state inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the last year or year and a half the momentum has really swung in the Palestinians direction. They’ve built up enough support for this  –  we call it the UDI, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence. They have found that something like 130 to 140 countries are prepared to recognize this Palestinian state.
The Palestinians began to realize that they needed to unify in order for this to happen. As it stands right now, it was very clear that the Fatah party, the Palestinian Authority, was going to make this declaration on its own given the fact that Fatah and Hamas were divided and given the fact that a separate government had been formed in the Gaza Strip. This certainly did not look very good when you think about what a potential state would look like.  How much confidence would the world have if, in fact, there were two separate mini-states that tried to declare independence in September of 2011?  So, the Palestinians met several times under the auspices of the Egyptians.  That dynamic in and of itself is very interesting, given that the Egypt has just gone through it’s own very rocky political process, the overthrowing of Husnei Mubarak back in February.
Nevertheless, the two Palestinian factions made this announcement last week that caught everyone flat-footed – and when I say “everyone” I mean the State Department, research institutions, and many of the non-profits organizations that follow the Middle East.

Do the Palestinians have anything to lose?
A:  They do have quite a bit to lose by entering into this agreement.  The bottom line is they needed to unite for this unilateral initiative, in order to get more support from the international community. Hamas very clearly needed to get on board with this initiative or it was going to be left out in the cold. If Fatah went ahead and announced a government without them it would not bode well for the future of the organization. It would have been a momentum changer in favor of Fatah. So, they were trying to stave off what could have been a political crisis.  As for Fatah — for a long time Fatah has been trying to gain control over Hamas; trying to bring it into the fold, so to speak, and they saw this as an opportunity.  In terms of this unilateral initiative, I think they saw it as important to get Hamas on their side at least for the short term.
Long term we’ve got a lot of questions about the viability of this partnership.  The two sides will not have a short memory about their conflict.  That conflict in June 2007 was a brutal war. So, I can’t imagine that they are going to easily forget these things and also, frankly, I don’t think that either side is interested in relinquishing power; they each have their own fiefdoms; they each control their own little mini-states, and the idea of creating some sort of unity government that would reign over both territories until elections are held May 1st of next year…it’s very hard to believe that either side would want to relinquish power ultimately if they lose in elections or if the dynamic changes.
For now both sides are looking at this unilateral initiative as the reason for their unification and I would not be surprised to see the dynamic shift quite a bit after the declaration. It will be interesting to see if they maintain the sort of kinship that they have been expressing in recent days.

Moving forward, what is U.S. policy on this?
A:  Obviously, the unification between Hamas and Fatah creates some major problems for the United States. Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization —  it has been designated as such by the State Department.  This means that no U.S. entity or person can engage in diplomatic ties with Hamas. This means very challenging things for the U.S., which, since Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s, has been building support for a Palestinian state.  We’ve been moving closer and closer, inching towards recognition.  Now, all of a sudden, just when we get to a place where the Palestinians are prepared to declare their own state they make it incredibly difficult for the U.S. to support them because of the inclusion of the Hamas faction.  It’s taken about 20 years to rehabilitate the Palestinian image. The Palestinians began to reach out to the U.S., talk about their willingness to accept Israel’s existence through U.N. resolution 242. And, now, all of a sudden, they join hands with Hamas which has vowed to destroy the State of Israel. It makes it incredibly difficult for the U.S. to maintain ties with this new transition government.
It will also make it difficult for the U.S. to continue to maintain the financial support we’ve been providing the Palestinians. Over the last couple of years we’ve been propping up the government on the West Bank with funds.  Now, the U.S. Department of Treasury, where I used to work, has designated Hamas as a terrorist organization and it will become illegal to support this transition government that includes Hamas. Obviously, we’ve got some major challenges ahead of us, but I think the answer is very clear.  If you look at what President Bush did in 2006 when Hamas won that election and there was an interim unity government at that point between Hamas and Fatah.  It never fully formed, but it was during that time that President Bush realized that he could not provide support to the Palestinian Authority.  He pulled that support and instead provided more humanitarian aid to the Palestinians through other channels. We had to pull funding from every Palestinian agency that had a Hamas footprint.  And, though, the State Department has not done it yet, I believe Congress will force the hand of the Executive branch and leave it with no choice but to take a page, so to speak, out of the George W. Bush handbook.

If there was already precedent that the U.S. would not accept a unity government that included Hamas, what was Abbas thinking if he knew that the U.S. would probably pull its support?
A: I believe Abbas realized at some point that he was not going to work with the U.S. any longer. One could argue that President Obama has been a strong ally of the Palestinian cause.  He has placed great pressure on the Israelis and there has been tension between the U.S. and Israel since Obama took office. What’s happened is that pressure has continued but, the Israelis have not succumbed to it.     The Israelis continue to navigate in ways that they don’t relinquish their national security demands. The Israelis were not willing to simply hand over land, and the Palestinians were not willing to make concessions. It didn’t appear that the U.S. was able to broker a deal on its own.   So, I believe the calculus on the part of Mahmoud Abbas was that it was no longer important to have U.S. support of this initiative; that they were able to reach statehood through the majority of states in the General Assembly.
There are some holes in that strategy. Number one, ultimately it is going to be impossible for the state to function without the full support of the U.S. and if they don’t get it it will be a major blow   to Palestinian nationalism, especially in its infancy.  Finally, the idea of going around Israel rather than through it from the perspective of negotiations is a critical error for the Palestinians. It’s long been said that the two people are effectively Siamese twins.  They don’t just overlap in the area that’s going to be disputed in the West Bank. The Israelis have been providing intelligence for the West Bank government to help roll back the forces of Hamas.  Inside those territories, they have been instrumental in providing electricity and water and critical services that the Palestinians need. If they circumvent the Israelis and the Israelis are sufficiently irked they may want to withhold some of those services.
The Palestinians have made an end run around everyone. No one suspected that this would be the case.  But they’ve done it.  The process is now under way and   it doesn’t look like the Palestinians are ready to step back in this game of chicken that they have started. I believe we are going to see this initiative roll forward with the façade of unity between these factions. From there, it’s anyone’s game – from the continued factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah, the potential loss of support from the United States, the potential loss of support from Israel.  I think we are going to see some challenges ahead for the Palestinians and for their new state, if one is declared.