For Palestinians, Gaza Conflict Deepens Sense of Futility With Nonviolent Approach Toward Israel
For Palestinians, Gaza Conflict Deepens Sense of Futility With Nonviolent Approach Toward Israel
Hamas’s latest battle against Israel sparked feverish Palestinian pride that spread beyond the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority-led West Bank. But it has also deepened a sense of futility here with the authority’s nonviolent, diplomacy-based approach to winning a Palestinian state.
The Gaza conflict catapulted the Palestinian cause back into international headlines and produced displays of unity across the Palestinian political spectrum. But it is a commonly held view here that the Islamist militants of Hamas — which refuses to recognize Israel — defeated their enemy, and that they did it with weapons, not words.
“They put Israel in its place. They forced Israel to withdraw,” Amanda Izzat, a 23-year-old university student who was shopping in Ramallah on Saturday, said of Hamas.
Many Palestinians say that the eight-day hostilities will energize the long-frozen pledges of reconciliation between Hamas and its rival Fatah, which leads the Palestinian Authority. But the conflict also underscored how starkly opposed the two factions’ strategies are. In a region where Arab Spring uprisings pushed political Islam to the forefront, some analysts say that Fatah’s secular nationalism looks more anachronistic by the day and that Hamas’s sudden strength has raised momentum for a more aggressive, even radical, posture in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Fatah member, dismissed Islamism as a fad. But she said she is increasingly worried that Palestinians will see armed resistance, which Fatah renounced in 1988, as the only mechanism that appears to win concessions from Israel.