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While Netanyahu’s vision for a new silk road through a Middle East without Palestine was certainly a concern, Rabbani doubts that Hamas believed it could derail the Abraham Accords. The desired impact, he said, was likely to send a message to the Arab public about the complicity of their rulers in crushing Palestinian aspirations as they carved out agreements with Israel. “If you look at the history of Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, Palestinian blood has never undermined them,” Rabbani said. “When Palestinians look at the region, they feel genuinely abandoned by their own leaders, by those who they consider to be their natural allies and natural champions, by the international community as a whole.” Arab nations have “to play this sort of balancing act between not upsetting their domestic population and being just the right amount of critical of the Israeli regime,” said Hawari, the political analyst at Al-Shabaka, adding that she has “no expectations from these despotic regimes” to defend Palestinians. “I think the Saudis will push for certain conditions not because they particularly believe very strongly in Palestinian sovereignty, but because also they know that, domestically, Palestine is still a popular cause in Saudi Arabia.” Abulhawa said that while she understands the value of the quest to fully understand the specific motivations and objectives of Hamas’s operations on October 7, it is essential to view it as a logical consequence of history. “Palestinians have, for decades, tried every possible avenue to shake off this oppression, this unrelenting, violent colonizer. So this was going to happen sooner or later. It was inevitable that something was going to come to a head, particularly in Gaza,” she said. “If you go back to the 1940s after the Nakba, there was a decade or so when Palestinians were just pleading with international bodies, going from one place to another, trying to negotiate for justice, trying to go home, trying to figure out a way. And there was no movement. We were completely irrelevant. Nobody even acknowledged us,” Abulhawa added. “It was only until Palestinians resorted to armed resistance that the world finally admitted that, ‘Oh wait, this is an indigenous population that does exist.’ It was only after we started hijacking planes and resorting to guerrilla warfare in the spirit of leftist guerrilla movements of that era that there was any movement towards liberation.” Leave a comment It was that armed resistance that created the space for the peace negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that many Western leaders hailed as a breakthrough. The 1993 and 1995 signings of the Oslo accords, brokered by the Clinton administration, were opposed not only by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other armed resistance factions, but also by prominent intellectuals. “Let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles,” wrote Edward Said in a prescient 1993 essay for the London Review of Books. "It would therefore seem that the PLO has ended the intifada, which embodied not terrorism or violence but the Palestinian right to resist, even though Israel remains in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.” Those agreements led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the concept of limited Palestinian self-governance embedded within the fabric of Israel’s apartheid regime that enforced the pre-October 7 status quo. In the aftermath of Oslo, both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad engaged in periodic campaigns of armed struggle against Israel, including through suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. This culminated in the launch of the Second Intifada in September 2000 that lasted more than four years. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a network of paramilitary forces aligned with Arafat’s ruling Fatah movement, joined the armed uprising. In the two decades following the intifada, much of the armed resistance has consisted of intermittent rocket attacks launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Gaza and occasional, small-scale attacks against Israelis. The post-intifada era of largely symbolic armed confrontation of Israel has unfolded in the midst of a political wasteland where the PA, Israel, and the broader international community led by the U.S. have presided over the decay of the dream of Palestinian self-determination. “After Oslo, we are talking about a disastrous political track,” said Naim. “After 30 years, the West Bank is annexed. Jerusalem is mostly Judaized. Al Aqsa is nearly totally controlled. Gaza is totally separated, isolated and besieged for 17 years, a suffocating siege.” Israel has mastered the exploitation of the specter of armed Palestinian resistance to justify its own wars of conquest and annihilation. And it has done so with the backing of the U.S. and a refusal by successive administrations to apply international law to Israel or to respect UN resolutions. “The problem that the West has with Palestinian resistance is not terrorism. It's not the targeting of civilians. It's not armed resistance. It's resistance full stop,” Rabbani said. “Whether it's massacring civilians or successfully hitting military targets or popular mobilization or boycott campaigns, there is not a single form of Palestinian resistance that the West is prepared to accept.” The October 7 attacks and the subsequent guerrilla war in Gaza against the Israeli military has undoubtedly raised Hamas’s political standing among many Palestinians. This support, though, may not necessarily translate into political and electoral victory down the line. “Whereas they clearly are in a stronger position politically than the PA, which is seen as a subcontractor for the occupation and as clapped out, exhausted, corrupt and so on by most Palestinians, that doesn't mean that there are not criticisms which many people are not willing to voice right now because they are standing up to the Israelis,” Khalidi said. “Their resistance, the fact that they're still fighting the Israelis on the one hand makes a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones farther away from Gaza, heartened. On the other hand, what has happened to the people of Gaza leaves a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones in Gaza, not so happy.” Rabbani agreed that how people in Gaza will ultimately judge Hamas’s responsibility for the apocalyptic devastation they’ve endured remains unpredictable. “I think there will also be many Palestinians who will look and say, ‘Okay, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble. You've left the people of the Gaza Strip defenseless and subject to genocide. And yes, Israel did it. Israel is responsible. But that's on you as well.’” At the same time, Rabbani says the attacks of October 7 represent a historic chapter in the cause of Palestinian liberation and compared it to other pivotal moments in anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and Vietnam that came with significant death tolls among civilians. “There's no denying the catastrophic consequences,” he said. “But my sense is that the changes in the longer term—of course without in any way trying to minimize the enormously unbearable damage that has been inflicted on an entire people—will, in the end, be seen as a critical turning point akin to Sharpeville, Soweto, Dien Bien Phu.” Abulhawa said that during her trips to Gaza she talked with people about how they viewed Hamas and encountered what she described as complex, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory perspectives. “The trauma is profound. And they'll tell you two conflicting ideas in the same breath. On the one hand, they're angry. And sometimes some people will blame Hamas, but everybody knows who's bombing them. Everybody.”