Now here’s a real rocket to make Israel shake

“I won’t be celebrating until I see it happening,” a colleague told me looking me in the eye as he drove me home, ignoring the Gaza City traffic in front of us. “We’ve done it before, we had barely finished celebrating, when Hamas and Fatah started killing each other.”

I feel we all need something to believe in, though I do not blame my Palestinian friends’ caution, and downright cynicism. More than six decades of ethnic cleansing, occupation, dashed hopes and deadly infighting are bound to leave their toll on a nation that is still struggling for statehood. Who am I to expect them to be optimistic when time and again they have been let down, by the world and by their leaders?

But when last Wednesday, news of the Fatah-Hamas agreement started coming out, even some of my most cynical Palestinian friends were stunned. A bolt out of the blue, without any hint of fanfare and pomposity, and with no advance invitation to the party, Hamas and Fatah declared they had agreed. Just like that. After four of the bloodiest years in Palestine’s internal history.

Of course the devil is in the detail – we have yet to see all the commas and dashes and brackets in the final document and how they will be put into practice. We have yet to see how the security apparatus will be managed on the ground, how the militias will be kept under check and how the families still aggrieved by the bloodbath in Gaza when Hamas ousted Fatah forces will be pacified.

But here’s the first detail that struck me: This announcement had no prelude, unlike the hundreds of others when Palestinians were told by their leaders dining in Cairo that they were just a corner away from reconciliation,  and everyone would go back home with nothing but more bitterness and divisions.

The respected Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar said on Al Jazeera this was the worst timing possible for Palestinians, as Netanyahu was addressing the US Congress and getting Americans panicking about Abbas sitting with “the terrorists”.

I could not disagree more. With the September plan for Palestinians to declare an independent state, things could not be worse than having a Palestinian state without Gaza. The context to this announcement is much wider than Bibi licking his wounds at his lapdog superpower’s lawn. It comes at a time of newfound Arab dignity, an awakening of the masses that keeps only getting bigger, the assertion of modern Arab identities in one region-wide revolution for freedom that is changing everything.

With Syria’s Bashar al Asad in deeply troubled waters as the revolution there keeps spreading, the exiled Hamas leadership can no longer take its status for granted. The treasure trove of Hamas’s most militant elements is running out, forcing Khaled Meshal to return to the path of sensibility and pragmatism. It is a cautionary tale to all the war mongers and sanctions-huggers that have been ostracising Hamas, Syria and Iran for the last decade – real change comes from the people, from the streets.

The streets of Gaza and Ramallah have also been flooded with the people. The youth have taken on the Arab revolutionary spirit to call for an end to the division. In Gaza, they were brutally repressed by the Hamas forces since 15 March, but none of the youth have given up on their commitment to see change.

Calling America’s bluff

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been calling on America’s bluff over the last month. The day after the announcement last week, he said, in English, to international journalists, in the serenest way possible: “Hamas are part of us. I cannot keep them out. Just like Netanyahu is our partner for negotiations.”

In reality, Abbas and all the Palestinians know Israel is no partner for peace. Even when Palestinian negotiators offered everything on a silver plate to their counterparts, Israel shunned peace while it expanded its illegal settlements, bombed civilians in Gaza and enforced some of the most racist laws ever against the people it was meant to be “seeking peace” with.

The Arab awakening, from a Palestinian perspective, means acknowledging that Israel’s and the world’s opinion is irrelevant to shape their future according to their own aspirations. It’s the common denominator linking ordinary Palestinians to the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Syrians and the Yemenis who realised change can only be brought about by them. In Palestine, however, Abbas is not the regime that has to fall down, but the figure called on by his citizens to be a leader and forge real reconciliation. The more Netanyahu urges him to “choose between peace with Israel or government with Hamas”, the more obvious his choice becomes, because there isn’t any. Israel has made the first impossible and the second inevitable.

Hamas’s charter – anti-Zionist and rhetorically problematic as it is for the moral crusaders – has been proved out of date through Hamas’s own behaviour on Israel’s doorstep. In total control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas has policed its borders, controlled cease fire agreements and clamped down on the extremists more or less in the same way Netanyahu has to deal with Lieberman and the loony settlers.

It has been a steep learning for the Islamist movement that found itself overwhelmingly voted into power five years ago, against its own expectations. The more ostracised it was by the world community, the more it had to learn by experience, making some serious blunders along the way. From resistance to government is more of a radical move than the mere changing of sides from opposition to the government benches in a normal parliament. Four years of official blockade and many more before of demonisation and all sorts of obstacles, the Hamas movement has stood up to the test of survival. It now collects taxes and duty on items imported through the tunnels; it employs unarmed traffic police in impeccable new uniforms in the main junctions; its social services ministry runs an internet registration service for people wishing to exit through Rafah; and it has started registering taxis and issuing special drivers’ permits. In short, despite the rusty kalashnikovs in the background and the occasional rocket launch into nothingness, Hamas is behaving like a government – even when it clamps down on civil liberties.

To question whether Hamas can be in a Palestinian unity government would not only disregard all of that, but it would be yet another nail in the coffin of the world community’s relevance. The point is, whether the US and the EU will accept Hamas in government or not, the Palestinians will forge ahead. It is their revolution.

It is the Palestinians themselves who are the real teachers of resilience. Close the borders, they will dig tunnels. Cut off the fuel, they will run cars on cooking oil. Marginalise them, and they will build the strongest bridges to the world of ordinary human people, fed up with the world community’s double standards and Israel’s impunity.

If the American Congress decides yet again to cut off all funding to the Palestinian Authority, effectively stopping all salaried government employees, security forces and major infrastructural works, it is not unity that will be compromised. Abbas seems eager to get it right this time, and the people will not hold that against him; they will start the Third Intifada.

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