Oliver Kamm

Dealing with Hamas

Several readers have referred me to a remarkable recent article in the London Review of Books by Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer who also spent several years in the Middle East as security adviser to the EU High Representative Javier Solana. Crooke's argument, in essence, is that the West should deal with Hamas and Hizbollah lest more extreme groups take their place:

This prospect may not disturb the slumbers of the Europeans, who will dismiss it as alarmist, even if their record of reading events in the area has been less than inspired. But these are the scenarios that are being taken seriously by thoughtful Islamists in the region. We should hope – that may be all we can now do – that moderate Islamist movements manage to navigate these turbulent times, in spite of European attempts to prevent Islamism, which is clearly now the dominant regional current, from reshaping Middle Eastern societies. These attempts are opening space, not for the moderate pro-Western secularists whom Europeans seek to empower, but for those who believe that to build a new society you must first burn down the old one.

The idiosyncrasy of Crooke's terminology - those "moderate Islamist movements" - is noted succinctly by Norman Geras. I have but one point to make about the substantive argument.

You can construct a case for talking to Hamas. It has been made in the past week by the senior Conservative Michael Ancram. The notion that you deal with terrorist groups by police action and political dialogue is also widespread in scholarly discussions of security policy. (See, for example, Diego Gambetta, "Can we make sense of suicide missions?", in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions, 2005 p. 299: "The future of SMs [suicide missions, i.e. bombings] will largely depend on whether, rather than a crude policy of war and intensifying the clangour of the clash of civilizations, opportunities for astute policing and genuine political processes will be taken up in earnest.")

That view should, however, properly be called a faith-based initiative, because it has scant evidence in its favour. I grant that it's plausible politics to seek to sublimate political violence in dialogue, but the more fruitful way to do that is to impress upon the practitioners of violence that they'll be defeated. They must therefore give up or face the consequences.

This is what nearly happened to Hamas in the late 1990s after Israel detained many terrorist suspects and the Palestinian Authority belatedly starting cracking down on the organisation. Between 1997 and 1999 there were only two suicide bombings by Hamas (both in Jerusalem), and the reason for the lull in activity appears to have been logistical: the leadership was in prison or in exile. That experience confounded two sets of mutually exclusive premises. First, those who maintained that it was not within Yassir Arafat's power to stop terrorism were shown to be wrong: he was able to deliver on his obligations under the Oslo accords, all right; he just chose not to for most of the time. Secondly, those who believed Oslo was a snare and a delusion for Israel were also refuted. There was a period when Oslo was clearly delivering. The Israeli Defence Force had withdrawn from all the major Palestinian areas in the territories; a clean Palestinian election took place in January 1996; and pressure was then applied by Israel and the PA on Hamas, with some effect. This was how Oslo was supposed to work. It might have succeeded, too. The block, as was always likely but was not inevitable, was the duplicitous and corrupt character of Yassir Arafat, who alone bears responsibility for the fact that there is not today a sovereign and independent state of Palestine.

It's possible to go through this history minutely, and Crooke doesn't go through it at all. What he does instead is invoke a spurious historical analogy without examining it:

When all parties begin to see conflict as inevitable, then the ‘inevitable’ becomes self-fulfilling. Americans are fond of comparing the situation in the region to the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism; but perhaps Europe in 1914 is a better metaphor: the situation is such that some small, unexpected autonomous event might trigger a sequence of events that even the great powers of the region could find it beyond their ability to control.

I doubt Crooke is familiar with German scholarship on the origins of WWI. The Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer demonstrated from archival research in the 1960s that German war planning had been developed at a War Council called by Kaiser Wilhelm in December 1912. It wasn't an accident: it was an intention. And while Wilhelmine Germany was not Nazi Germany (it didn't commit genocide in Europe, though Africa was a different matter), it was a deeply militaristic and autocratic society whose right-wing leadership sought the status of a World Power, Weltmacht. Crooke's analogy is far closer to the model of the rise of totalitarianism than he thinks it is. And if a writer is invoking a historical precedent for a policy prescription, it's not a pedantic objection to say he hasn't thought it through.

One last point about Crooke is worth noting, and I ought to have said it on this site before. Last January, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, notoriously held a day-long "conference" on the theme "A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations". I was a panel speaker at two of the sessions at this jamboree, and gave an account here of what I said. I commented that one of those sessions, which was nominally supposed to be on the subject (an absurdly grandiloquent title, but I tried to be faithful to it) of "Democratic solutions for the Middle East", turned out to be not a discussion of the Middle East but only of one country within it. I didn't comment, however, that Alastair Crooke was another member of that panel.

I welcome the opportunity to have a public debate with Crooke, or with another panel speaker whom I did mention by name, Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative and now an Oxford academic. Both are weighty and experienced commentators. But bear in mind their premises - respectively, dialogue with Hamas and an absolute Palestinian "right of return" that would ensure Israel ceased to be a Jewish state. Consider also that the fourth and last member of the same panel was a lady called Susan Nathan, who moved from the UK to Israel a few years ago and became an evangelist for, as she puts it here, "unavoidably the end of the Jewish state". (Ms Nathan was, however, not a weighty and experienced commentator, but a dim monomaniac who in a debate lasting nearly two hours managed to mention not a single country other than Israel. I did point this out - her singlemindedness, I mean, not her dimness - in my concluding remarks, and was glad to learn afterwards that the chairman of our session had commiserated with Ms Nathan on my discourtesy.) In short, the panel, like the whole event, was a farce. As another speaker at the occasion, Martin Bright of the New Statesman, pointed out afterwards to Livingstone's spin doctor: "The conference was a disgrace. It was a set-up for panellists who didn't parrot the Ken line on radical Islam."

I've noticed both Crooke and Ms Nathan being given a notably easy ride by media outlets (including the BBC - here and here) for what are, to say the least, heterodox opinions. (I'm not aware that the same is true of Karma Nabulsi.) In my experience, they merit rougher handling than that, and certainly ought not to be presented at council taxpayers' expense as voices of sagacity and moderation.

Stuff

I'm sorry there's been so little on this site this week. Here are a few things I've seen or done.

Gerard Baker in The Times today aptly comments:

Let’s never lose sight of a simple chilling fact that unites the suicidal maniacs in Britain and the sweet reasonable hostage-saviours in Gaza. Hamas was the big winner this week. That makes us all, whether we’re sipping beers in pavement cafés in Israel, boarding planes in Glasgow or out for a ladies’ night in the Haymarket, much, much less safe.

I have an article this week in The Jewish Chronicle, which you can read here. It's an adaptation of my comments on this site a week ago about the Milibands, the Jews and foreign policy. You can also read David Aaronovitch's latest column for the same newspaper, entitled "Anti-Zionists should grow up". It refers to an anti-Zionist campaigner called Tony Greenstein, whom I met once more than 20 years ago and who has remained in my memory as the stupidest man I've ever met. I don't necessarily recommend your following this link but it will provide you with supporting material for that judgement.

Only on the letters page of The Guardian would you find an argument, expounded without irony, of the form "as Osama Bin Laden made clear..." (last letter on the page). Its author is maintaining that there are substantive causes in Western foreign policy for Muslim anger. The letter, like so much along the same lines that appears in that newspaper's comment pages, is inflammatory nonsense, but I was particularly taken with the notion that we ought to tailor our foreign policy to the demands of a man who asserts (in his 1998 statement "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God". It is, of course, strictly true that the jihadists hate us for, among many other reasons, our foreign policy. The only proper response is satisfaction that we have that effect on them.

On the same subject, I called after the 7/7 bombings for the sacking of the editor of The New Statesman, John Kampfner, on account of his emblazoning the front page with the preposterous and indecent message "Blair's bombs". The author of that cover story, John Pilger, this week pronounces the failed bombing of a nightclub in London and of Glasgow airport "Brown's bombs". I modestly direct you to irrefutable evidence I have previously cited that by the same criteria (which is to say, entirely bogus ones) all of these terrorist acts are in fact "Pilger's bombs". Unlike most of the writers listed to the left of this post, I have never once written for The New Statesman, and I expect the invitation to make this observation will be some time coming.

I took part this morning in a pre-recorded discussion for GMTV's Sunday programme (which goes out at some unearthly hour on Sunday morning: hence the pre-recording, and the unlikelihood that many of my readers will see it) with the civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti. We were debating how to respond to terrorist threats. In short, I feel there is a serious risk of underreacting to the fortunately incompetent attempted attacks of the past few days. There is of course a trade-off to be made between gaining intelligence about those who wish us harm and the popular disaffection that might arise through security measures. The classic instance is internment without trial and the euphemistically termed "deep interrogation" methods used in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s: the additional intelligence these practices yielded was slight, and the resentment they generated was great. The judgement comes down to how you assess the gravity of the threat. International law allows the suspension of some non-absolute rights (an absolute right would be a right not to be tortured) during national emergencies, and internment has been practised in wartime. The wartime cases of, for example, the appalling Oswald and Diana Mosley - who were incarcerated reasonably at the start of WWII, but unreasonably when the direct threat of invasion had eased - and the innocent and grossly maltreated Japanese-Americans indicate that the criterion of an emergency can be abused. But the current British constitutional settlement seems to me an entirely sensible one. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act of 2000 ensures that there is judicial scrutiny of intrusive measures such as the interception of communications, and we have not resorted to emergency war powers legislation. What I would like to see, however, is an easing of the criteria for holding suspects and eavesdropping on Internet communications. Our intelligence services and armed forces have strict rules of engagement, and we must be prepared that at some point - as nearly happened in the past week - these will fail.

"The Islamists are not going anywhere"

About a new prime minister and his principal immediate test, Matthew d'Ancona in The Sunday Telegraph makes the most sensible observation of the day:

Though a longstanding defender of the Iraq invasion (I think there are about five of us left now that Mr Blair has gone), I can see why Mr Brown regards it as politically opportune to welcome back [to government] the opponents of the war and to signal to the electorate that, while he cannot pull our troops out tomorrow, he will as soon as he can. What Friday's foiled bomb plot shows, however, is that Iraq or no Iraq, Blair or no Blair, the Islamists are not going anywhere. Almost two years since 7/7, it was only good fortune that spared Mr Brown a 29/6, as a bloody welcoming present from the terrorists.

We have heard so often, and will continue to hear, that the Iraq war and Blair's alliance with George W Bush were a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda and its affiliates in this country. That may be true, but only in the sense that everything is a recruiting sergeant for this cause: the removal of the Taliban, the existence of the state of Israel, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the end of the Muslim caliphate in 1924, the way women dress in the West. One of the conversations bugged in Operation Crevice that led to life sentences for five terrorists in April included a chilling discussion about bombing a London nightclub. "Now no one can even turn around and say 'Oh they were innocent'," said Jawad Akbar, "those slags dancing around."

It is extraordinary that d'Ancona needs to say this, but there are an awful lot of obtuse people in public life and I have little doubt we shall be hearing from them soon enough. Only a matter of weeks ago the same newspaper reported:

Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq contributed to the London bombings of July 7 2005, according to a leading Church of England bishop.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, said that mistakes in the Government's foreign policy had damaged society and radicalised Muslims, leaving them alienated and resentful.

In an outspoken condemnation of the Prime Minister's Middle East strategy, he blamed what he called a series of blunders for turning law-abiding citizens into potential suicide bombers.

"Government underestimated the effect the invasion would have in terms of community cohesion," said the bishop, who is the co-chairman of the Church's Interfaith body. "Britain being involved in a war with a predominantly Muslim country was bound to have repercussions."

Bishop Butler is known to the public only for one thing, if that. His suppositions on terrorism and foreign policy would be unreported were it not for his episcopal office, which is no assurance that they will be enlightening and is indeed almost a guarantee of the opposite. In this case he managed to talk not only nonsense, but inflammatory nonsense, for the insinuation - he didn't have the intellectual honesty to state it explicitly - that in pursuing our foreign policy aims and forming our alliances we got what was coming to us. Let me at least try to reason those who share that premise into the prolonged silence that would now be their greatest contribution to public policy.

A fortnight after the 7/7 bombings my friend Norman Geras pointed out in The Guardian the selectivity of the type of "root cause" explanation proffered for that mass murder:

A hypothetical example illustrates the point. Suppose that, on account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this and express their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame this act of violence on the government's decision or urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn't happen, because the anger of the thugs doesn't begin to justify what they have done.

To reinforce Norman's point, I'll give an example that isn't hypothetical: it was published in the New York Post after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin a dozen years ago. The paper's comment editor, Eric Breindel (a ferociously talented journalist who died at the age of 42 in 1997), wrote an article entitled "Israel's Fault Lines" on 17 November 1995 (it's republished in a posthumous volume called A Passion for Truth: The Selected Writings of Eric Breindel, edited by John Podhoretz, 1999, pp. 178-79). Breindel lamented (emphasis added):

The fact that Rabin and Shimon Peres were prepared to transfer the West Bank to alien rule on the basis of a razor-thin 61-59 majority in the Knesset is a comment on their willingness to test the very fiber of Israeli democracy. Such a path - in light of the Oslo agreements' implications for Israel's security and for the entire Zionist enterprise - served virtually to invite fanatics like Yigal Amir to "protest" their sense of disenfranchisement.

Does that form of argument sound familiar? Breindel was a muscular but mainstream conservative figure who had worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff and was admired across the political spectrum. Of course he deplored terrorism. But I was taken aback when I read that passage all those years ago. I remain so on reading it now, and would be even if I shared the view that Rabin and Peres had been wrong to pursue the Oslo route. Try as I might, I cannot see how Bishop Butler could offer a principled objection to the line of reasoning I have quoted.