Defunding Hamas

The House of Representatives yesterday approved a measure stating that “no United States assistance should be provided directly to the Palestinian Authority if any representative political party holding a majority of parliamentary seats within the Palestinian Authority maintains a position calling for the destruction of Israel.”

J. Lichty has a good analysis of the problems with such Congressional actions:  the resolution is not absolute, but only expresses what the House thinks “should” happen; it is not self-implementing, but depends for its execution on a State Department whose bureaucracy has different ideas; the suggested limitation on “direct” assistance masks a huge loophole, since it leaves all indirect funding in place; and — not surprisingly — the lack of any impact of the resolution in the real world generates an easy bipartisan vote for an essentially feel-good action.

The view from the other side can be gleaned from the article that Joseph Massad (who teaches an infamous course at Columbia on the “Zionist-Palestinian conflict”) has published in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly.  He suggests Hamas should forgo funding from both the US/EU and the Arab/Muslim oil countries, and just get on with the Third Intifada:

The funding scenarios look as follows:

— The US and its allies will cut off all direct and indirect funding to the PA in the hope of forcing Hamas to tow the line.

— The US and its allies will cut direct funding to the PA (which constitutes little money relatively) and maintain indirect funding to non-PA channels and NGOs (which is where the large sums go), claiming that these organizations are the only ones that will be able to subvert Hamas’s agenda and that cutting them off would mean handing all of Oslo’s "achievements" over to Hamas.

Regardless which of the two scenarios is used . . .  Hamas will seek, and is in fact already seeking, alternative funding from Arab and Muslim Gulf countries.  As Arab countries are as scared of the popularity of Hamas today as they were of the Palestinian guerrilla movement in the 1960s and 1970s, they are eager to find ways to co-opt and control it . . .

Massad thinks that, since funding from any outside source will be accompanied by unacceptable conditions [that is, acceptance of Israel], the only successful strategy for Hamas is “the one that the PA and Arafat, under instructions from their funders, put an end to in 1994, namely a return to the mobilization of the first Intifada . . . .”

Reading Massad, it is easy to foresee what is coming next: staged “massive civil resistance” to the “apartheid wall,” the “colonial settlements” and the “humiliating checkpoints,” with demonstrations by large crowds who will have found it unwise to resist the urgings of Hamas “activists” to participate — together with periodic terrorist actions by the mysteriously uncontrollable Islamic Jihad and a variety of “previously unknown” terrorist groups (perhaps “loosely linked” with somebody or other) — plus coordinated attempts to bring all these issues to the UN to internationalize pressure Israel to continue its unilateral retreat disengagement. 

And in the end, the US, EU, UN and others will still provide the Palestinians money.  Only the pretext remains to be worked out.