During an interview on the margins of the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, Palestinian Authority prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh informed reporters that the Kremlin is prepared to welcome a variety of Palestinian delegations for talks, including Hamas. “One should not continue focusing on October 7,” Shtayyeh said of the unproductivity associated with harping on the barbaric bloodshed for which his terrorist counterparts were responsible. “We need a situation in which Palestinians are united.”
The optics of such a meeting seemed to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, at the very least, a little gauche. “As Putin effectively kills Navalny, could Palestinian factions not come up with a better place to meet than Moscow?” he asked with palpable embarrassment. “Is that what they stand for? And if Putin’s colonial invasion of Ukraine is acceptable, why aren’t Israel’s colonial settlements also fine?” Really, can’t Hamas and the Russians observe a little more decorum here? Do they even consider how this makes their apologists look?
Roth was trying to be clever. Instead, all he managed to expose were his own glaring blind spots, and not just those with a moral dimension. He doesn’t seem to have been following the news. This will not be Hamas’s first meeting in Moscow either before or after the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the objectives shared by both Moscow and Hamas seem to elude him, and they are nothing less than the destruction of the Western-led geopolitical order.
“On at least two occasions since Moscow embarked on its war of territorial conquest and subjugation in Ukraine, the Kremlin has welcomed high-level delegations of Hamas terrorists,” I wrote in the wake of the 10/7 massacre, an event that opened a new front in the ongoing global campaign America’s competitors are waging against the U.S. and its allies. “We know those meetings came at Russia’s request, though their precise nature is unclear.” Indeed, the horrors Hamas precipitated seemed to intensify the Kremlin’s efforts to strike a partnership with the terrorist sect.
Russian media revealed that Hamas’s representatives made another sojourn to Moscow in late October of last year. There, Hamas designees met not just with representatives of the Russian government but also Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani. In public, these parties presented themselves as neutral arbiters of the conflict in the Middle East rather than what they are: the prosecutors and instigators of the world’s most dangerous wars. After the meeting, Hamas’s Mousa Abu Marzook confirmed that his intention was to seek the support of Russia, “a friendly country,” in its effort to destroy Israel.
Hamas officials conducted further political consultations with the Russians in January. For their part, the Kremlin’s functionaries insisted their talks with Hamas were focused on humanitarian issues and efforts to establish a Palestinian state, with a few words thrown in about the need to surrender the hostages in Hamas’ custody, including three Russian citizens. Hamas negotiators insisted the meeting revolved around their efforts “to resist the Zionist occupation by all available means.”
In October, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace detailed the extent of the emerging partnership between Hamas and Moscow, which it determined was more or less cosmetic. “[T]here is little reason to expect it to increase its material assistance to the group — of which there is little evidence as it is,” the report read. “Most likely, these overtures will remain at the level of rhetoric.” But as Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Polish academic, told MEMRI, Moscow’s objectives are far grander than merely presenting itself as an alternative geopolitical pole around which the region’s anti-Western elements might rally:
“First, it leads to refocusing of the U.S. and European attention from Ukraine to Israel, and (as Putin hopes) to a decline in the Western assistance to Ukrainian army that may allow the Russians to stop Ukraine’s counteroffensive and recapture the strategic advantage.
“Second, Putin of course dreams of a new migration ‘earthquake’ that can send millions of refugees from the Middle East toward the borders of the European Union. It is widely known that Palestinians are not welcomed by their fellow Arab neighbors and would most probably seek asylum in Europe.
“Third, the Israeli ground operation may create a huge wave of support for ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza adding to the ‘global South’s upheaval’ that Putin awaits, as he positions himself as the leading ‘anti-imperialist’ figure.
“Fourth, Putin wants to broaden the widespread confrontation with the West, hoping that the clash between Hezbollah and Israel may bring Iran into the expanding quarrel and therefore destabilize the entire region. . . .”
If any of this comes as a surprise to the executive director of Human Rights Watch, we’re left to wonder precisely whose human rights the group spends its time watching. Strategic cooperation, if not coordination, between Moscow and Hamas is no secret. It’s been taking place out in the open. If those who devote all their energies to clucking their tongues at Israel over its conduct in a war of self-defense are embarrassed by the conduct of their tacit partners in that endeavor, they only have themselves to blame.