Hamas Prepares For Next Military Confrontation With Israel

Since the last military conflict in Gaza, in July-August 2014, Hamas has been working to restore and build up its strength in advance of the next conflict with Israel – renewing its excavation of tunnels and manufacture of rockets, building up its weapons stores , conducting military training exercises, and establishing army camps. Senior movement officials are calling repeatedly for liberating all of Palestine, praising and encouraging jihad, martyrdom, and armed resistance, and threatening to expand their attacks into a full-blown intifada in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Some Hamas officials have called for opening additional fronts against Israel.
Underlining this, Abu 'Ubaida, the spokesman for Hamas's 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, said at a ceremony honoring the Rafah martyrs: "The battle is not yet over... The arrogance of the occupation will force upon it new wars, whose shape and character it cannot foresee... Every day, our people are capable of refreshing the [flow of the] blood in the arteries of the resistance, in numerous ways."[1]
In a speech marking the 27th anniversary of Hamas' founding, former Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad said: "Thousands have joined the Al-Qassam Brigades since the last Gaza war... The West Bank will [also] rise up [in an intifada] against the occupation, and the resistance in Jerusalem must be escalated."[2] It should be noted that at the same time, Hamas leaders are saying that they are not interested in an escalation in Gaza.

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8516.htm

Notice how they say occupation force.



Wanting the best of both worlds:

But things aren’t always black and white in Statehood theory, said Amichai Cohen, a senior lecturer of international law at Ono Academic College. “It’s a process. There is not always an exact moment in time when an entity becomes a state.” Regarding Palestine, “we’re currently in the middle,” he assessed. As more and more states and international organizations move to recognize a Palestinian state, its recognition will at some point become final. Retroactively, the current wave of European endorsements will then be seen as one step in the continuum toward statehood, he said.


Palestine’s ostensible statehood raises some other questions, said Kontorovich, who is currently also a senior fellow at Kohelet, a Jerusalem-based think tank. “They’re acting in an incoherent way,” he said about the Palestinian leadership. “A state means something, it’s not just an idea. Being a state means having a territory with a government that exercises control. It can’t be under occupation. Because being occupied means you’re not in control.” In historical precedents, new countries came into being by getting rid of foreign rule. Israel, for instance, was declared only after the British Mandate ended. “Before that, it would have been a joke,” Kontorovich said. An Arab state of Palestine would be the first new “state” that still is occupied at time of its inception, he said.

“The Palestinians want to have best of both worlds. They want to have a foreign ministry and embassies across the world, give out passports and pass laws, and at the same time complain that they’re dispossessed and controlled by Israel.”
The Palestinians argue that theirs is a state under occupation, similar to France being occupied by Germany during World War II. But this situation cannot be compared to today’s Palestine, which claims to have come into being while under occupation.

“There is no example in the last 50 years of a state being created while all of its territory is being occupied,” Kontorovich said. In his view, the Palestinians indeed have a state, but therefore can no longer claim to be occupied.“ Rather, the current conflict should be seen as a border dispute,” Kontorovich said. The Palestinian people exercise self-determination in the parts of the West Bank under their control (Areas A and B), which means Palestine is indeed a state. While the Palestinians wish to exert control over the entire West Bank, self-determination doesn’t necessarily mean you get the best possible borders for your state, he argued. “There are Hungarians in Serbia, that doesn’t mean that Hungarians don’t have self-determination.”



Read more: An unstoppable avalanche toward Palestinian statehood? | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/an-unstoppable-avalanche-toward-palestinian-statehood/#ixzz3XHFn4Pja