The Calm before the Storm

Hamas had made great strides in revamping its image in the West. Shortly after its election in 2006, it had started to employ public relations experts. Its officials had taken to wearing suits and implied that Hamas now accepted a two-state solution. The siege of Gaza, supported by Bush and Blair, was depicted in absolute terms and as verging on a humanitarian crisis. It also attempted to play down the anti-Jewish elements in its charter and any mention of Christendom's assault on Islam during the crusades. In 2008 Mahmoud Zahar would never have repeated his May 1995 criticism of Hanan Ashrawi, one of the post-Oslo Palestinian negotiators, that ‘she is a woman, she is a Christian and she smokes’. Suicide bombing was no longer considered an appropriate weapon. Comments that Israel's conduct towards the Palestinians was actually revenge for the Prophet's treatment of the Jewish tribes in Medina nearly fourteen centuries previously were no longer heard.

In the late 1990s, its Political Bureau under Khaled Meshal had prepared a memorandum of explanation for western diplomats which advocated a battle of ‘total liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river’, putting an end to ‘the Zionist project and establishing an Arab Islamic state in the whole of Palestine’. It rejected the many agreements signed at Oslo, Wye River and Sharm al-Sheikh because they bestowed legitimacy upon Israel and opened the way to normalization with Arab and Muslim countries. These basic ideas remained and were fundamental in preventing any agreement with Fatah.