No political solution to Israeli occupation: Hamas

News Desk - The Cradle 

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh stressed that the only solution to the conflict is for the Israelis to leave occupied Palestine

Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas, stated in a speech on 22 August that there can be “no political or security solution to the conflict in the West Bank unless the Zionist occupier leaves Palestinian land.” 

Commenting on the ongoing operations and developments in the West Bank, Haniyeh stated, “Another siege, another closure, liquidations, arrests, and the demolition of homes, all of this will not change anything.”

He stressed that there is no political or security solution in the West Bank, as the so-called political solution represented by the Oslo Accords has failed, and “our people no longer bet on this path, which cost us a lot of the constants of our cause and our historical rights in Palestine."

In his speech, Haniyeh added, “The insistence of the occupier on settling in the West Bank, and the continuation of the policies of annexation and Judaization in Jerusalem, will be met by our people with more steadfastness and resistance, and will awaken in each of our generations the spirit of uprising and revolution.”

"The so-called security solution based on the strategy of killing, assassinations, and the encroachment of the West Bank has not and will not work with our unbreakable people, who are stubborn in the face of the occupier." 

The Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between the late Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. The accords established the Palestinian Authority and security forces and gave the Palestinians limited autonomy in some parts of the West Bank in preparation for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. 

However, the accords did not end Israel’s military occupation and gave the Israeli government time to confiscate more Palestinian land to build more Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. 

The strategy of quietly building more settlements, or establishing “facts on the ground,”  under cover of an ongoing peace process, has been challenged recently by Jewish Supremacist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who came to power in December as part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new ruling coalition.

Ben Gvir and Smotrich are leaders in the settler movement and have called for a more brazen approach. They advocate openly annexing the West Bank and expelling Palestinians in a replay of the 1948 Nakba, in which Zionist militias ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians to make way for establishing the Israeli state with a Jewish demographic majority.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently criticized such a brazen approach, suggesting it threatened the “shared fiction” of a future two-state solution and establishment of a Palestinian state which helped allow Israel’s illegal settlement project to continue under the umbrella of US diplomatic support.

Friedman wrote, “One of the most important Israeli and American shared interests was the shared fiction that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was only temporary and one day there could be a two-state solution with the 2.9 million Palestinians there. Therefore, the US doesn’t need to worry about the now more than 500,000 Israeli settlers there. Some will stay when there is a two-state deal; others will go.”

Friedman added, “Because of that shared fiction, the U.S. has almost always defended Israel in the U.N. and the International Court of Justice in The Hague against various resolutions or judgments that it was not occupying the West Bank temporarily but actually annexing it permanently.”