Who Has What Leverage Over Hamas?

Ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Gaza continue to grind along, and Hamas has responded negatively to the latest offer on the table. Which makes me wonder -- what are the leverage points that exist on Hamas that might help pressure it towards accepting a ceasefire deal?

Since I was recently pancakes/waffled on this, I want to clarify that I'm not saying that Hamas is the only obstacle that has or does exist in front of a ceasefire. My position continues to be that neither Hamas nor Israel seems especially interested in a ceasefire deal, and since both parties need to agree, that relative lack of interest represents a significant problem.

That problem, in turn, suggests that making progress on a ceasefire deal may -- at different times and contexts -- require exerting pressure or leverage on Israel and Hamas. If what you actually care about is ceasefire now -- that is, it's not a stalking horse for "keep the war going unless and until my side gets what it wants" -- then one needs a model for how one can, where necessary, pressure Israel to move off certain lines as well as a model for how one can, when necessary, pressure Hamas to move off some of theirs.

For Israel, it's pretty clear what the potential pressure points are -- in fact, there's a superabundance of them. Military aid, international legal rulings, even western protest movements all in various ways are mechanisms through which outside actors can exert pressure to get Israel to change its behavior and agree to things that it might otherwise be disinclined to accede to. There are all sorts of debates we can have about which levers it is proper to pull and what the un/anticipated effects of our decisions might be -- Dan Nexon had what I felt was a very thoughtful post on this -- but it's not especially opaque where the leverage points are.

For Hamas, though, things are a lot blurrier. There is an interesting Foucauldian dynamic at work here where Israel's greater power paradoxically also makes it more vulnerable -- being far more tied into American and global centers of power means there are a lot more touch points between Israel and the international community that can converted into areas for exerting pressure. Power and resistance are two sides of the same coin. But when we're talking about Hamas, it's not clear where those touch points are.

This is not, to be clear, the normative argument one sometimes hears whereby because Israel is more powerful it deserves to bear the brunt of pressure or it has the responsibility to take the leading role in changing course. My point is that even if we wanted to "pressure Hamas", how would we do it?

In a military conflict, military force is of course one answer. Problem one with that answer is that the point of this exercise is to try to end the military conflict, not intensify it. But the bigger problem two is that Hamas doesn't actually seem that influenced by military damage. On any conventional metric, after all, Hamas is enduring catastrophic losses on the battlefield -- the sorts that would under normal circumstances constitute significantly losing a war and seeking to sue for peace. But Hamas doesn't seem especially bothered by its battlefield losses, and doesn't seem to view its military defeats as demanding a change in the status quo.

In any event, our whole goal here is to figure out points of leverage that aren't More War (with Israel, for instance, the American pressure points are more diversified and do not take the form of "do it or we start flattening IDF bases"). So what are they? Who has the leverage points over Hamas, and what are they? We can't withhold military aid we don't have. Withholding humanitarian aid is morally abhorrent (and frankly also has not seemed to significantly affect Hamas' behavior). Do people think protests would work? By whom, and where? Are their nations who have more "touch points" with the Hamas leadership that can be brought to bear? If so, how can they been induced to wield their leverage. And if all of this seems far-fetched or fanciful, don't we have a serious problem?

Of course, some people will accuse me of being naive in thinking that the "ceasefire now" crew actually is interested in a ceasefire; others will no doubt think that even suggesting Hamas is not fully committed to stopping the war is a Zionist apologetic. 

(I need to digress a bit to talk about this story on a proposed ceasefire resolution that got tabled by the Yonkers City Council, because it has strong "In a Nutshell" vibes related to this whole problem. Basically, pro-Palestine groups loudly demanded a ceasefire resolution; pro-Israel groups equally vocally opposed it. After a bunch of negotiations and rewrites, the city council came out with a compromise resolution that called for a ceasefire, release of Israeli hostages, and recognition of both Israel and Gaza's right to exist and exercise self-determination. And the result was that the pro-Palestinian groups switched to opposing the ceasefire resolution because it acknowledged Israel's right to exist, and the pro-Israel groups remained opposed it because it called for a ceasefire. By the end, the only groups that seemed to actually support the ceasefire resolution were mainline liberal Jewish groups, who needless to say were catching fire from both sides of the spectrum.)

All of which was to say that while there are plenty of people for whom "ceasefire" is a talking point rather than an actual goal, I also do think there are plenty of people who really are genuinely motivated to see an end to the bloodshed and an immediate-term resolution that is, if not ideal, then at least tolerable as a holding pattern for building a more durable just peace going forward. For that cadre, we need to have theories and ideas regarding how to dislodge Israeli intransigence and Hamas intransigence. The former we basically have, at least at the ideas level. The latter we don't seem to have even in concept, and that's a problem.

And one more thing just to be clear -- one dimension of why this serious problem is serious is that the inability to influence Hamas' behavior does not justify just indefinitely blitzing Gaza into dust. The only thing worse than dropping bombs on Gaza until Hamas changes its behavior is dropping bombs on Gaza without it having any impact on Hamas' behavior, but just doing it anyway because it's something. The lack of meaningful points of leverage over Hamas represents I think a genuine puzzle for folks working in this arena that I'm not sure how to effectively resolve, but it's something that has to be dealt with by anyone who thinks Hamas has even a share of responsibility for ending the current state of affairs.