Yesterday, we wondered whether Israel had obligations to re-occupy the Palestinian areas in the event of the Palestinian Authority’s collapse. Today’s Jerusalem Post suggests that Hamas is deliberately trying to engineer the collapse of the PA in order to draw Israel back into a long-term occupation that would eventually lead to Israel’s own collapse:
But at the same time, said Gidi Grinstein, head of the Tel Aviv-based Reut think tank, certain factions inside Palestinian society were not interested in the two-state solution. They were, he said Thursday, interested in drawing Israel back into Gaza, perpetuating Israeli occupation, believing that this would lead to Israel’s collapse from within.
In a paper Reut published last November, Grinstein wrote that the aim of this strategy “is to establish one Palestinian/Arab/Islamic state in place of Israel through actions that will bring about Israel’s internal collapse as a state.”
According to this strategy, “the occupation accelerates Israel’s implosion and therefore should be sustained. Either way, the Hamas government in and of itself serves the ‘Strategy of Implosion’ because it creates a political deadlock, deepens the Palestinian crisis of representation, and erodes the PA’s capacity to govern.”
Grinstein, who was an adviser to Ehud Barak when Barak served as prime minister, said that the collapse of the PA – a situation of “non-governance there” – was bad for Israel. “We will have no one to talk to, and too many people to shoot at,” he said.
“There are groups, Palestinian and Muslim Arabs, who are beginning to question whether their immediate goal should really be to try to push Israel out of the West Bank, and who are saying that the continuation of the occupation may accelerate Israel’s implosion,” he said….
Because of some of the Palestinian factions’ desire that Israel remain an occupying force, the threat of the IDF moving back into Gaza is a hollow one. That’s what they want, Grinstein said.
