Mahmoud Abbas is the key to ending Hamas
The first trucks with humanitarian aid are beginning to enter the Gaza Strip thanks to the agreement reached between the United States, Israel and Egypt. The expert international analyst, Marta González Isidoro, spoke to the microphones of Onda Madrid's "De cara al mundo" to shed light on the issue and on the importance of Mahmoud Abbas as the main guarantor of reaching agreements in which diplomacy prevails and the deaths on both sides cease.
I read in your article in Voz Populi: "If the Palestinian leadership is smart, it will understand that this is the last chance history will give it to normalise itself as a people". Do you think that Hamas, which knew what Israel's reaction would be when it started this terrorist action on Israeli soil against civilians in the whole area, is aware of this? Or is Hamas, as a terrorist group, interested in violence? Because it is worth remembering that neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank there have been elections since 2006, which makes the legitimacy of Hamas's power in the Gaza Strip much more than questionable.
The Palestinian movement is an entelechy, beyond political consideration, whose outcome or resolution depends on a political understanding between the parties. This has been demonstrated after the failure of the Oslo Accords and all the possibilities that have been closed to establish political arrangements for separation and the creation of a Palestinian state living in security alongside a state of Israel also in security.
We have here two movements that are at loggerheads and have been fighting for a long time to establish who has more legitimacy and more power to take ownership of what is known as the Palestinian cause, which is what you are asking me about, Hamas, on the one hand, and the Palestinian Authority, with Mahmoud Abbas at the head in the West Bank, on the other, with Al-Fattah, which is the majority movement. We have seen that the two organisations in recent years unfortunately have the same objective, but with different aims.
Hamas is a fundamentalist religious movement whose aim is not only to put an end to the presence of an Israeli state in the region, but also to any possibility of a non-Muslim state in the region, because it has an Islamic conception. And we saw this very clearly on 7 October itself, when on Al-Arabiya television, a few moments after it began, they called the operation Al-Ahsa deluge. They were calling for a holy war, a holy war to liberate Palestine, which is ideological, not earthly, and hence all these extra-regional movements and this effervescence in the world outside the Middle East world.
How important is the figure of Mahmoud Abbas?
Mahmoud Abbas is in a complicated situation. To disengage from an action by Hamas and its Ezein al-Qassam brigades, which have constituted genocide and crimes against humanity, if Mahmoud Abbas is brave and dissociates himself, because he has the possibility to dissociate himself from this violence that is very similar to the violence we have seen in the Islamic State and is strong in his movement, he could count on the support not only of Israel, which is being considered at the moment. Not only is it already considering not only breaking Hamas's political, organisational and military structure in Gaza, but it is also considering reconsidering its relationship with the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank to the point of not only breaking the Oslo Accords, but ending any possibility of agreement with any leader, moderate or otherwise, on the Palestinian wing.
An intelligent position in the conflict would be to use this moment to move definitively away from terror and seek a solution with Israel and the more moderate countries in the region.
Mahmoud Abbas himself in the West Bank, as president of the Palestinian National Authority, has not held elections since 2006. It is the same case as within the Palestinian people, who are unable to elect their leaders because they have been deprived of elections since 2006. In any case, the question right now is whether Israel should hold back?
It depends on what is meant by containment. Because at the moment, in Israeli society, not only on a political and military level, but also on a social level, they are digesting this very strong, very deep shock, which has meant that in less than five hours they will kill in the most brutal and savage way, as we have not seen since the times of the murders in Eastern Europe, or in the Holocaust era, and which we have unfortunately seen in the war in Syria with the Islamic State on civilian citizens.
Right now, Israel is in a state of legal war and has all the legal legal systems in place that allow it to enter the Gaza area to disable and dismantle Hamas's military, political and propaganda objectives.
Is it a grave mistake to enter Gaza?
The question is, and here we enter the fine line of international law and humanitarian law, that with Hamas we are not talking about or Israel does not have a democratic interlocutor in front of it, it does not have a state with defence forces, armed forces that are governed by moral and ethical codes and subject to international law. They are hybrid actors, terrorist actors who use their own civilian population as human shields. The moment a school, a hospital or a civilian area harbours military weapons, it automatically becomes a military target.
The humanitarian crisis that we are already beginning to see and that is likely to intensify will affect both Palestinian and Israeli civilians for years to come. That is not going to be able to return until there is assured security in the Negev area. So we are going to see in the coming days whether Israel's incursion comes for two reasons. First, because Hamas is holding a huge number of Israeli citizens, but also of other nationalities. We are talking about a very large number of civilians, especially women and children under the age of 10.
Where does Hamas' success lie?
We have already started to see analysts, we have started to see videos of terrorists or members of the Ezein Al-Qassam brigades who are starting to convert little children. When we see in some videos that babies of one, two, three years old, they are starting to teach them the first words. The first words we hear in the videos are the bismillah.
It is a very delicate situation, very delicate because, in addition, society itself, the Israeli side that is most favourable to negotiations, to agreements of understanding, to peace, is seeing how they cannot find an interlocutor on the other side, and very dramatic voices are being heard. Even leaders, we could even be talking about leaders in the Israeli political spectrum itself who are anti-Zionist, and there are some of them too. The parties, the equivalent of Spain's Podemos, who are there, who are very anti-Israeli, very anti-Zionist, very much in favour even of the possibility of a single bi-national state, are now saying out loud "it's either them or us". And that's terrible because it can cause a lot of pain on both sides. And we are going to see it.