A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
The Hamas guy in the OP is literally talking about how they would lay down arms and become a party. IRA to Sinn Fein.
(Will there be splinter hardliners? Sure! There is a civil war at the end of Independence. But there is a promise of peace after the civil war.)
Yes, like I said, assuming complete good faith. But even then, laying down their arms wouldn’t mean that fighters for their cause would no longer exist; it would simply mean that a better-organized Palestinian military would take its place.
My point isn’t “Five year truce bad”, it’s “Five year truce good but there ARE reasons to not accept it even from an abstract standpoint”
A better organized Palestinian military is a natural consequence of independence. And ideally yes, the best trained Hamas fighters will be joining it and be under government control, fighting against the hardliner splinters to enforce the hypothetical Independence Peace agreement, rather than being the hardliner splinters.
The road to peace will be very very messy. It is the bed Israel made and has to sleep on. The time when a relatively clean, peaceful transition to 2SS could have happened was right after Oslo. But here we are and it’s either a super messy transition to 2SS that will require nerves of steel to not intervene in the civil war, or a super messy transition transition to a democratic post-apartheid 1SS that will also require nerves of steel and a political and cultural transformation. Or … the ethnic cleansing, which hardliners in both Israel and Palestine dream of and we all dread.