That's the title of a blog post by Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy. The post begins: "The Army War College chose this week to release a report that has some surprisingly kind words for Israel's foes in the Gaza Strip."
Note (added in edit): Ricks's title is misleading, since the report is by a single author. However, the AWC often issues reports that seem strikingly well timed to critique current military thinking. Ricks, who has forgotten more about foreign policy than I'll ever know, seems to be nodding toward this characteristic in his title and lead sentence.
The full report, by Dr. Sherifa D. Zuhur, is called HAMAS and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics. The biographical note says, in part:
SHERIFA ZUHUR is Research Professor of Islamic and Regional Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute. She has many years of field experience in the region and specialized in the study of Islamist movements since the late 1970s. She has lectured internationally, and held faculty positions in American and Middle Eastern universities including MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, the American University in Cairo, and the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Diplomacy at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
It's 102 double-spaced pages long, but the last third is bibliography, so it doesn't take that long to read. In one prophetic moment, she writes:
Israelis have for over a year been discussing the wisdom of reconquering the Gaza strip (a prospect that would aid the Fatah side of the Palestinian Authority) and also engage in "preemptive deterrence" or attacks on other states in the region. This could happen at any time if the truce between Israel and HAMAS breaks down, although the risks of any of these enterprises would be high. (Emphasis added)
And at the end of her introduction, she notes:
Negotiating solely with the weaker Palestinian party — Fatah — cannot deliver the security Israel requires. This may lead Israel to reconquer the Gaza Strip or the West Bank and continue engaging in "preemptive deterrence" or attacks on other states in the region in the longer term.
The underlying strategies of Israel and HAMAS appear mutually exclusive and did not, prior to the summer of 2008, offer much hope of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict. Yet each side is still capable of revising its desired endstate and of necessary concessions to establish and preserve a longterm truce, or even a longer-term peace.
I mention this because, in diaries that suggest talking with Hamas, people always post passages from the Hamas charter in knee-jerk fashion. But the truth -- and even Hamas -- is more complicated than a simple statement. This report adds important nuance to the vision of Hamas that we tend to get in the West.
Update: you can download the full report here.
Update II: I thought I'd talk about the charter, which has been mentioned indirectly in the comments about Hamas's founding intention. Zuhur refers to the charter as "defunct" and notes that Hamas no longer cites it. Zuhur notes:
Khalid Mish`al, the current leader of HAMAS, claims that the Charter "should not be regarded as the fundamental ideological frame of reference from which the movement takes its positions." And another important HAMAS leader, Ibrahim Ghosheh, has explained that the Charter is "not sacred," its articles are "subject to review."
Zuhur goes on to suggest other documents that better explain how Hamas has been developing since its founding.