Hamas must not concede in talks what Israel failed to win on the battlefield

Hamas must not concede in talks what Israel failed to win on the battlefield Submitted by Sami Al-Arian on Fri, 08/28/2026 - 14:36 As pressure mounts to disarm and incorporate it into a reconstructed Palestinian order, the movement needs strategic patience to preserve its independence and resistance identity Hamas fighters secure the area as Egyptian workers and Red Cross officials search for the remains of the last Israeli captive, in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, on 8 December 2025 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) Off Some moments in the history of liberation movements require courage to act; others require equal courage to wait. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023, was a daring decision that shattered assumptions that had governed the Palestinian question for years. It brought Palestine back to the centre of world politics, exposed the illusion that it could be managed or bypassed, and confronted Israel and its western supporters with a conflict they had convinced themselves could be contained indefinitely. Nothing that followed can justify transferring responsibility for Gaza's destruction from those who destroyed it to those who resisted them. Responsibility for the devastation of Gaza, the killing of its civilians and the ruin of its homes, hospitals, universities and schools belongs to those who carried it out. Criticism of Palestinian strategy must never become a mechanism for absolving the perpetrators and their supporters. The scale of that sacrifice demands a harder look at how it is being managed politically. Hamas today faces perhaps the most difficult transition in its history. The movement that entered Al-Aqsa Flood as an armed resistance organisation now confronts enormous pressure to emerge from the war disarmed, removed from governing Gaza, integrated into a reconstructed Palestinian political system and dependent upon arrangements designed principally by the US and Israel with the tacit support of regional mediators. Tactical flexibility is indispensable to any resistance movement, but it must serve a coherent strategy rather than gradually displace it. Four developments should concern anyone who believes the resistance must preserve its independence: the political trajectory signalled by Hamas's 2017 document, the handling of postwar negotiations, the mounting pressure for disarmament and the movement's re-engagement with its old Fatah-aligned rivals. A political wager Hamas's 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies, issued well before Al-Aqsa Flood, was widely understood as an effort to present a more pragmatic face to the world. It accepted a sovereign Palestinian state along the 4 June 1967 lines as a formula of national consensus, while refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist state and maintaining the right of resistance. The position had a long pedigree. As early as 2009, Khaled Meshaal, then the head of Hamas's political bureau, told the New York Times that his group "had accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] based on a long-term truce". The document represented a political wager : that moderation would break the movement's isolation and open doors in Europe and beyond. Hamas should study Fatah's experience and refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise of future reciprocity European figures discussed whether it justified engagement. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair after leaving his post as the envoy for the Middle East Quartet - which includes the US, EU, UN and Russia - courted Hamas's leadership, and later acknowledged that the boycott imposed after the movement won the 2006 elections had been a mistake. Yet the broader political opening never came. Therein lies the lesson: a liberation movement should distinguish between flexibility exchanged for concrete political gains and concessions offered in anticipation of western acceptance. The real danger is a process in which each concession becomes the starting point for the next. Fatah travelled down that road decades earlier, with each concession presented as the gateway to the next diplomatic breakthrough: recognition was to produce reciprocity, negotiation to deliver statehood and security cooperation to build confidence, while Oslo itself was supposed to be transitional. Instead, the transitional became permanent as settlements expanded, the occupation deepened and sovereignty receded, leaving Fatah today a shadow of its past. Hamas should study that experience and refuse ever to surrender a strategic position in exchange for a promise of future reciprocity. Western approval is not a Palestinian national objective. Squandered leverage The second concern is more immediate. Negotiations are a contest over interests conducted through bargaining power, yet since the war entered its diplomatic phase, Hamas has repeatedly appeared willing to relinquish leverage before securing reciprocal, enforceable gains. The release of the Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander in May 2025 was presented as a goodwill gesture intended to reopen diplomatic space, but goodwill has value in negotiation only when the other side treats it as something to reciprocate. The larger test came with US President Donald Trump 's Gaza initiative in September 2025. In its initial response , Hamas agreed to release the Israeli captives, living and dead, under the exchange formula, and accepted the transfer of Gaza's administration to an independent Palestinian technocratic body. As the world fixates on Hamas, who will disarm the Israeli settlers storming West Bank villages? Read More » On the broader future of Gaza and fundamental Palestinian rights, however, it insisted that such questions belonged within a comprehensive national framework. I had argued for precisely this approach days before the movement issued its response on 3 October 2025. Once the captives were exchanged and that undertaking fulfilled, Hamas should have considered stepping back from direct negotiation over the larger questions, since a resistance leadership does not have to conduct every negotiation itself. It could have entrusted the bargaining to experienced independent Palestinian negotiators versed in international law, diplomacy, American politics, Israeli negotiating practice, maps and security arrangements, while itself defining the objectives and the red lines. One of the tragedies of the Palestinian negotiating experience since the 1980s has been the repeated confusion of revolutionary legitimacy with negotiating competence, which was among Fatah's costliest mistakes under Yasser Arafat. The record of Oslo makes the asymmetry plain. Israel fielded specialised teams, serving generals and the seasoned foreign ministry lawyer Joel Singer; as Mahmoud Abbas himself later acknowledged , the Palestinians were negotiating against "an experienced, capable delegation" without comparable expertise of their own. Negotiation is a profession, and recognising that a movement lacks it costs far less than pretending otherwise. Follow Middle East Eye's coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza The Vietnamese understood this well. Throughout the long Paris talks, Hanoi treated diplomacy as one instrument within a larger political and military strategy: the Politburo set the objectives and the permissible concessions, while veteran negotiators such as Le Duc Tho conducted the bargaining. When the talks moved beyond positions the leadership was prepared to accept, the negotiators were instructed to return to the earlier agreement as the basis for settlement. The art lay in knowing what could be traded, what had to be preserved and when compromise served the wider goal. More than weapons These questions have become urgent because Hamas has moved from discussing governance to entertaining formulas concerning its weapons. Recent proposals would see them stored or transferred as part of a demilitarisation arrangement tied to Israeli withdrawal, an approach Israel has rejected while insisting on complete disarmament first. Are Palestinians really expected to hand over their weapons while the tanks are still at the border? The pattern is familiar from the Oslo years: a Palestinian concession enters the diplomatic record, Israel rejects the arrangement as insufficient, and the next negotiation begins from the concession rather than from the position that preceded it. The reward for an unreciprocated concession is usually another demand. Disarmament therefore goes to the identity and strategic purpose of the movement itself. Restraint can itself be a form of resistance, and Hamas need not return to governing Gaza: relinquishing direct administration might even free the movement from the contradiction between governing a besieged population and functioning as a resistance organisation. Leaving government and abandoning resistance are entirely different propositions. The greater danger is that a movement exhausted by war and subjected to extraordinary pressure from mediators and international powers could be transformed, incrementally, into merely another Palestinian faction seeking a place in an electoral order whose parameters others have designed. Fatah's transformation came about exactly that way. A concession was justified as tactical, another was required to preserve the political process, and another was demanded to demonstrate seriousness, until an organisation established to liberate Palestine became the governing component of an authority operating under occupation. The movement's re-engagement with its old rivals in Fatah's orbit belongs to the same set of concerns. In August, Hamas met officials from the Democratic Reform bloc of the former Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan, in contacts a Hamas official confirmed to Al Jazeera, ahead of Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for November. Weeks earlier, a senior aide had said that Dahlan intervened in the disarmament negotiations through direct contacts with the US president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Political circumstances change, and old adversaries meet. Yet Hamas should ask what purpose these returns are designed to serve, and why the very powers now pressing for its disarmament appear so comfortable with them. Strategic patience Defenders of the present course will ask what the alternative is, and the answer is strategic patience: a movement under immense pressure does not have to resolve every question immediately. Hamas can fulfil the limited agreements it has made while declining to negotiate away questions that belong to the Palestinian people as a whole, using the intervening period to reorganise while the environment becomes clearer. The region has changed since 2023 in ways in which the consequences are still unfolding. A growing number of analysts argue that the confrontation involving Iran , Israel and the US may leave Tehran strategically stronger than many anticipated . Washington and Tel Aviv, meanwhile, have expended enormous military, political and diplomatic capital. Gaza itself remains under a fragile ceasefire, with the sequencing of Israeli withdrawal and disarmament unresolved. Why should Hamas negotiate as though today's balance of power were permanent? There is a time to fight, a time to negotiate and a time simply to hold one's position Elections are a legitimate instrument of popular representation, and Palestinian institutions desperately need renewal after years of stagnation and eroded democratic legitimacy. Taking part in them is one thing; allowing them to redefine the movement's relationship to resistance is another. Hamas needs to state clearly what it now considers its strategic constants, and how armed, popular, political, legal and diplomatic forms of resistance fit within them. Such questions cannot be answered through piecemeal agreements negotiated under pressure. There is a time to fight, a time to negotiate and a time simply to hold one's position, which is sometimes nothing more than the refusal to make irreversible concessions under temporary pressure. Al-Aqsa Flood came at an almost unimaginable human cost to Gaza, and that cost must never be used to delegitimise Palestinian resistance or shift responsibility from those who devastated the Strip. Neither does the magnitude of Palestinian sacrifice exempt Palestinian leaders from strategic accountability: a resistance movement has to protect the political value of the sacrifices made in the name of its cause. Hamas can leave the government of Gaza, contest elections under the right conditions and negotiate when circumstances require, without allowing tactical concessions made under extraordinary pressure to redefine its principles. Where its own negotiating capacity is inadequate, it should have the confidence to entrust the bargaining to professionals while retaining the authority to set the red lines. The gravest danger facing Hamas now lies beyond the battlefield. Having survived one of the most destructive wars in modern history, it could gradually concede at the negotiating table what its adversaries failed to attain by force. What Israel could not extinguish through military might and genocide should not be surrendered through the fine print of an agreement concocted in Washington. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion The Palestinian people have paid an almost unimaginable cost since 7 October 2023. The task now is to protect the political value of those sacrifices and to distinguish what can be negotiated from what belongs to the nation as a whole Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0