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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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20 January 2010
By Alan
Nasser
Israel’s
stated reasons for its declaration of “all-out war”
against the population of Gaza are the latest
variation on a theme it put forward following the 2006
electoral victory of Hamas in Gaza. In February of
that year Israel issued an official set of demands.
Israel requires that Hamas recognize Israel’s
permanent right to exist, forswear violence and accept
the validity of previous Israeli-Palestinian
agreements. Israel claims that Hamas’s failure to meet
these demands explains and justifies its aerial blitz
on the people of Gaza.
In fact,
Israel’s aggression has little to do with Hamas’s
response to these demands, which are, as we shall see,
disingenuous.
Israel
contends that the need to defeat Hamas is the core
issue motivating its current air attacks. This claim
is especially difficult for Americans to evaluate. The
US media routinely echo official Israeli demonization
of the objectives and actions of Hamas.
Understanding
Hamas’s history and current position on the key issues
is essential to appreciating what is really at stake
in the escalating crisis in Israel and Palestine.
The aim of
what follows is simply to situate Hamas in the context
of the occupation and Palestinians’ response to it.
Let us begin with Hamas’s origins, and then move on to
examine each of Israel’s 2006 demands.
The Emergence of Hamas In Israel
Hamas
descended directly from an earlier Islamic movement
concerned primarily with the provision of education,
health care, food aid and other social services to
Palestinians suffering under the Israeli occupation.
This group
was funded by the Saudi monarchy and… the government
of Israel! The latter provided the movement with land,
buildings and no small measure of encouragement.
Israel’s
rationale was simple: the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO), at the time the chief
representative of Palestinians’ interests, was overtly
political and secular, with a few socialists in its
highest ranks. The organization aimed to organize
Palestinians into a force capable of ending the
occupation. The Israeli leadership sought to shift
Palestians’ loyalty from the secular, political PLO to
the religious, non-political predecessor of Hamas.
The Israelis
imagined that the provision of extensive social
services and religion to Palestinians would
de-politicize them by relieving their suffering and
disinclining them to nationalist, anti-occupation
resistance.
Thus, Israeli
occupation authorities forcibly exiled pacifist
Christian Palestinian activists who encouraged
non-violent resistance, but permitted radical Islamic
groups to hold gatherings, publish newspapers and have
their own uncensored radio station.
Unsurprisingly, the religious social service groups
were to become increasingly politicized. They
witnessed the escalating brutality of the occupation
and the ineffectiveness of charitable activity alone
in undermining enforced apartheid. They continued
their social service activities, but coalesced in 1987
to form Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya,
The Islamic Resistance Movement.
Hamas’s new
political self-definition as representing Resistance
to the occupation both sealed their fate in the eyes
of the Israelis, and boosted their appeal to
Palestinians.
In 1992
Israel expelled hundreds of Hamas members. Very few
were accused of violent crimes. The UN Security
Council unanimously declared the expulsions a
violation of international law and called for the
return of the exiles. But the incoming Clinton
administration blocked the enforcement of the
resolution.
The result
was that the exiles became heroes, and Hamas’s
reputation and political strength among Palestinians
grew significantly. Still, in 1993 Hamas had the
support of only 15 percent of Palestinians. What
accounts for the growth of Palestinian support for
Hamas since then?
Israel and The Palestinian Authority
Kill Palestinians’ Hope
In the years
following the 1993 Oslo Agreement between the PLO and
Israel it became clear that nothing was being done to
advance the formation of a viable Palestinian state.
Hamas pointed out that the Agreement was, by Israeli
design, open-ended, in stages, calculatedly vague and
non-commital, and with no guarantees regarding key
issues like settlements, land and water, the status of
Jerusalem and the return of refugees.
Moreover,
even as the Oslo negotiations proceeded, and lasting
for years thereafter, Israel continued to build
settlements at an accelerated pace. The settlement
blocs were positioned in such a way as to create
“facts on the ground” which would make it impossible
to designate an area that could constitute a viable
Palestinian state.
The
Israeli-born Haifa University history professor Ilan
Pappe has accurately described the Oslo Accords as a
trick to allow Israel to continue to build settlements
such as to corral Palestinians in South African-style
bantustans.
All this
culminated, at Camp David in 2000, in Barak’s
“generous offer”, a striking vindication of Pappe’s
accusation: a Palestinian “state” with no territorial
continuity, divided by settlement blocs, bypass roads
and roadblocks, with Israeli control of the entire
border. The area permitted to Palestinians would
include 69 settlement blocs, housing 85% of all
Israeli settlers. Palestinians would have to travel 50
miles from one town to another, with many pointless
delays at checkpoints and roadblocks,in order to
traverse a real distance of 5 miles.
And during
the entire process, Israel continued to expand its
colonization of the West Bank, doubling the number of
settlers in the ten years following the signing of the
Accords.
This was a
slap in the face to Palestinians, who had agreed,
through the PLO, to accept a mere 22 percent of the
land that was theirs before 1948. Conceding 78 percent
of the land was an historical Palestinian compromise.
Since the
Oslo and Camp David meetings the condition of
Palestinians continued to deteriorate. It became
increasingly clear that the PLO and its successor, the
Palestinian Authority (PA), were not merely inept at
negotiation, but that the PA and its leader Yasir
Arafat were steeped in corruption, with much of the
Authority’s funds lavished on cronies while Arafat
spent much of his time living in luxury far from
Palestine. The last straw was the PA’s decision to
assign its police to assist the occupation authorities
in the suppression of Palestinian resistance.
In contrast,
Hamas was perceived by Palestinians as honest and
genuinely responsive to their interests. Hamas
unremittingly critiqued the PA’s ineptitude and
corruption. But its approach was not merely negative:
as we shall see below, Hamas proposed policies and
bargaining points that were constructive, realistic
and which did not threaten Israel’s right to exist.
These
develpoments were the beginning of mounting
Palestinian support for Hamas.
The
mainstream media tend to portray Palestinians’ 2006
electoral choice of Hamas as a show of support for
political violence as a means of resolving the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Indeed, the media
routinely equate Hamas with mindless violence in the
service of the destruction of Israel. None of these
allegations against Hamas and the Palestinian people
is true. Let us examine the general question of the
political violence of stateless people, before moving
on the specifics of Hamas’s position with respect to
the current crisis in Gaza.
Preliminary Questions: Statelessness
and Legitimate Violence
The
Palestinian resort to violence has no connection to
the question of Israel’s right to exist. That
Palestinian resistance to the occupation sometimes
takes violent forms does not bespeak a desire to
annihilate Israel. In the case of the Palestinians,
the resort to violence cannot be understood apart from
an appreciation of the peculiar liabilities of
statelessness.
The
mainstream media make no effort to communicate to the
general public the uniquely debilitating effects of
statelessness. Statelessness is not merely to be
without “a land of one’s own.” Max Weber’s definition
of the state is most relevant here: the state is
the political institution that monopolizes the
legitimate use of violence.
The state may
rightfully employ violence as a means of addressing
injustices done to its citizens. If someone kills your
child, you may not imprison her in your attic as
punishment. Instead, you report the perceived
injustice to the state authorites, who then adjudicate
your complaint through the justice system. A moment’s
reflection reveals that a stateless people are a
people who lack any legitimate means of defending
themselves against injustice.
A stateless
people are structurally helpless in the face of
injustice. For if modernity limits the violent
response to injustice to state intervention, then
statelessness mandates the passivity of the stateless.
The latter are turned into involuntary pacifists.
Statelessness disallows to Palestinians the only kinds
of resistance appropriate to the instruments of
oppression they face, namely forceful, aggressive
resistance. For the entity that oppresses Palestinians
is a racist and colonialist state that has made it
clear, as we shall see below, that it will negotiate
none of the demands of its colonized population, and
that it has a strong penchant for the ongoing and
superfluous use of its own instruments of destruction.
Bitter
experience has taught Palestinians that non-violent or
civil resistance/disobedience is in fact ineffective.
Non-violent peace activists like Rachel Corrie
(American), Tom Hurndall (British), and Gil Nima’ati
(Israeli), among many others, met with death by IDF
forces who knew exactly what they were doing.
In spite of
all this, the statelessness of Palestinians dictates
that they may not “take matters into their own hands.”
For Palestinians to take the measures that would
normally be taken by a State whose citizens are
treated by an enemy power as Palestinians are treated
by Israel is termed “terrorism.” Lacking a state to
protect their interests, Palestinians find themselves
in the following unenviable position: irrespective of
what is done to them, the only ‘legitimate’ responses
are passivity or reliance on the kindness of
strangers. And the response of the “international
community” to Palestinians’ plight makes it clear that
the former are in effect strangers to them, and not at
all kind strangers. Illegitimate response, then,
becomes the only alternative to embracing defeat.
Note the
peculiarity of the the use of ‘illegitimate’ in this
context. To call private or non-state violence
“illegitimate” is to imply that State action is
available. But in the remarkable case of an oppressed
people without a state, the normal distinction between
legitimate and illegitimate action has no application.
While the
violence of stateless resistance movements is by
definition illegitimate, i.e. not legally effected by
a state, it is an open question whether such violence
is justified. It is clear to the majority of
the world’s populations that violent resistance to
Israeli apartheid is as justified as was the sometimes
violent resistance of South African blacks to the
apartheid regime of their oppressors.
The question
for us in connection with the Gaza crisis is whether
Hamas is prepared to forswear violence short of the
elimination of the state of Israel. In other words: Is
Hamas open to a non-violent resolution of the
Israel-Palestine conflict? We shall see in what
follows that Hamas is indeed open to such a
resolution.
Is Hamas Commited To The Destruction Of
Israel?
Hamas’s
earliest founding statements indeed denied Israel’s
right to exist. As we shall see, Hamas has abandoned
this absolutist stance. The organization’s growing
support led it to assume a renewed sense of
responsibility for those who brought it to power. The
Palestinian community was largely secular and never
embraced the absolutism of Islamic fundamentalism. In
spite of continuous Israeli terror it continued to
endorse the two-state solution.
Hamas has
taken a firm stance against a call by al-Quaeda to
pursue a violent jihad aimed at snatching all of
Palestine from Israel. Hamas responded, in March
2006, that
“Our
battle is against the Israeli occupation and our only
concern is to restore our rights and serve our
people.”
In the
elections that brought Hamas to power in Gaza in 2006,
Hamas’s “pragmatists” prevailed over the minority
hard-liners, many of whom have since turned into
moderates. Hamas has always been responsive to its
constituency. It knows that its electoral victory was
due not to religious extremism, but to Hamas’s
platform of honest, effective and clean government and
improved social services.
In a
post-election opinion poll only 1 percent of
Palestinians said that Hamas should impose Islamic law
on Palestine, while 73 percent supported a two-state
solution as part of a peace accord with Israel. Hamas
responded with a reaffirmation of its own support of a
two-state solution.
Henry Siegman,
former Executive Director of the American Jewish
Congress and former director of the U.S. Middle East
Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, was
assured by an influential member of Hamas’s Political
Committee that Hamas does not rule out official
recognition of Israel, but that Hamas will not
renounce its belief that Palestine is a religious
endowment assigned by God to Muslims. However, the
official added that this theological belief does not
preclude accomodations to temporal realities and
international law. This includes, he emphasized,
recognition of Israel’s statehood.
This position
has a precise parallel on Israel’s side. Religious
Jews believe that God promised all of Palestine to the
Jewish people. But they are prepared to defer the
implementation of this religious claim to the time
following the appearance of the messiah.
In other
words, in the real world, the religious convictions of
both Hamas and religious Jews are consistent with a
practical and secular resolution of their conflict.
The Israeli
leadership is full aware of all this. Its real
objection to Hamas is that the organization embodies
more genuinely than any previous Palestinian
leadership resistance to the occupation and savvy
negotiations toward an independent Palestinian state.
Why Doesn’t Hamas Now “Recognize”
Israel?
The
recognition issue is a red herring. It’s Politics 101:
Hamas’s recognition of Israel would signify its
acceptance of Israel’s non-recognition of a
Palestinian state. Hamas has made it clear that were
Israel to offer a genuine two-state solution with a
return to its 1967 borders, and this were ratified by
a majority of Palestinians, Hamas would find this
acceptable. That would lead to official recognition of
Israel.
What matters
is official recognition, which can only be done by a
sovereign state. Hamas can no more “recognize” Israel
than Likkud can recognize Spain. And, in the case of
Israel, what is to be recognized? Israel refuses to
declare its official borders.
Is Hamas Commited To Political
Violence?
Even the
Israeli press has reported that Hamas offered Israel,
shortly after its 2006 electoral victory, an extended
cease-fire and de facto acceptance of two states if
only Israel would return to its 1967 borders.
Rather than
sieze this opportunity to test Hamas’s good faith,
Israel chose to punish Gaza’s entire population with a
blockade in order to pressure the people to renounce
the results of the election.
In fact Hamas has repeatedly
held to cease fires, which Israel has routinely
violated. The connection between Israeli violations of
cease-fires and suicide bombings is instructive. (A
fuller treatment of this issue has been provided in
two important articles by the Middle East scholar
Steve Niva at www.counterpunch.org/niva08272003.html,
and www.counterpunch.org/niva03242004.html, upon which
I rely heavily in the following remarks on Israel’s
provocation of suicide bombings.)
There is a
virtually infallible predictor of a suicide bombing:
an Israeli assassination of a senior commander or
military leader of a militant group. This predictor is
most reliable when the assassinations take place while
these groups are negotiating for a truce on attacks on
Israelis, or when the assassinations break
longstanding cease-fires by Palestinian groups.
This pattern
became more frequent and predictable after Ariel
Sharon became Prime Minister in February 2001. He
escalated the assassination campaign against leading
Palestinian militants.
Sharon
deliberately chose periods during which
anti-occupation groups were either negotiating or
actually upholding cease-fires on attacks on Israeli
civilians.
Here is only
a selection from many examples:
·
Two
months into a Hamas cease-fire, Israel assassinated
two leading Hamas commanders in Nablus on July 31
2001. Less than two weeks later there was a Hamas
suicide bombing in a pizzeria in Jerusalem.
·
While Hamas was adhering to an agreement not to attack
targets inside Israel following the 9/11 attacks,
Israel assassinated senior Hamas leader Mahmud Abu
Hanoud on November 23 2001. One week later there were
Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa.
·
In
the middle of a cease-fire declared by all the
militant groups in late December, Israel assassinated
leading Hamas militant Raed Karmi on January 14, 2002.
Less than 2 weeks later there was a suicide bombing
retaliation.
·
In
July 2002 there were widespread reports that a
unilateral cease-fire declaration by Hamas would be
announced on July 23rd. On that day, just
before the anticipated announcement of the cease-fire,
Israel assassinated the senior Hamas military leader
Salah Shehada by an air attack on a crowded apartment
block in Gaza City. Among those killed were 15
civilians, 11 of them children. Less than 2 weeks
later Hamas retaliated with a suicide bombing.
·
On
03/22/04 Sharon had the founder and spiritual leader
of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, assassinated. The predictable
followed.
Israeli
Journalists Denounce Israel’s Complicity in Suicide
Bombings
Some of Israel’s
most prestigous political commentators have suggested
that Israel is responsible for at least some
Palestinian violence. This position cannot even be
formulated in the standard language of the American
media, which consistently defines Israeli violence as
“retaliation,” and Palestinian violence as “attacks.”
In an article
(November 25 2001) in Israel’s most widely read
newspaper Yediot Aharanot, Alex Fishman, the
newspaper’s conservative military commentator noted
that
“Whoever
decided upon the liquidation of Abu Hanoud knew in
advance that [a terrorist attack inside of Israel]
would be the price. The subject was extensively
discussed both by Israel’s military echelon and its
political one, before it was decided to carry out the
liquidation.”
Writing in
Ha’aretz (January 21, 2002) the journalist Danny
Rubinstein pointed out that
“Israel’s
assassinations today generate far more damage than the
benefits they are supposed to bring...it can be said
explicitly this time that Karmi’s assassination has
already and directly cost the lives of the ten
Israelis who died in last week’s murderous terrorist
attacks.”
Rubinstein’s
use of “directly” here is an assertion that Israel
shares some of the responsibility for the suicide
bombings.
An editorial
in Ha’aretz (August 2, 2002) following the
assassination of Shehada, declared that
“In short,
any four-year-old child who examined this pattern of
events would conclude that this government, whether
consciously or not, is simply not interested in the
cessation of the terrorist attacks, for they
constitute its raison d’etre”.
Hamas spelled
out the chilling implication of all this immediately
following the killing of Yassin:
“Today
Ariel Sharon ordered the killing of hundreds of
Zionists in every street, city and centimeter of the
occupied lands.”
For years,
Israel disingenuously insisted that the suicide
attacks were the main obstacle to negotiations. Since
the most recent truce that began last summer, Hamas
Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh removed that obstacle by
bringing about the complete cessation of suicide
bombings. Predictably, this made no difference to
Israel, which responded by denying Gazans electrical
power, medicine, medical equipment and food.
The question,
then, is not merely whether Israel has a direct
interest in perpetuating Palestinian terrorist
attacks, but whether Israel has any intention whatever
to make even the slightest concession to Palestinians
toward the establishment of the two-state solution.
Israel’s
Intentions: A Just Settlement, Or Ethnic Cleansing?
Ephraim
Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence
agency Mossad, reported on December 23 that Hamas
“[is]
ready and willing to see the establishment of a
Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967… [Hamas
is prepared] to adopt a path that could lead them far
from their original goals…Israel, for reasons of its
own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start
of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”
Halevy might
be unaware of Israel’s “reasons of its own” for
sabotaging negotiations aimed at the establishment of
a Palestinian state, but not for lack of frank
statements from Israel’s leadership. On November 14,
1998, Ariel Sharon declared that
“It is the
duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion,
clearly and courageously, a number of certain facts
that are forgotten with time. The first of these is
that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state
without the eviction of the Arabs and the
expropriation of their lands.”
In 2005 Dov
Weisglass, Sharon’s senior advisor, said of Israel’s
withdrawal from Gaza:
“The
disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies
the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that
there will not be a political process with the
Palestinians…this whole package that is called the
Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda
indefinitely.”
Lest it be
thought that this position was peculiar to the rabid
Sharon, here is what Ehud Olmert said in an address to
a Joint Session of the US Congress on May 24, 2006:
“I
believed and to this day still believe, in our
people’s eternal and historic right to this entire
land.”
Israel’s Real
Motivations
What Israel fears
is not terrorism but Palestinian independence. Israel
will not permit a sovereign Palestinian government to
emerge on land it intends to hold -and probably
expand- as its own. The Palestinian Authority was and
is in Israel’s pocket. Hamas never will be Israel’s
pawn. Therefore, it must be eradicated. This is a
principal reason for the current blitzkrieg against
Gaza. But it is not the only one.
Israeli
elections will be held in February. Before the siege
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likkud was ahead in the polls.
The blitz is a demonstration of toughness, a gesture
of which politicians are known to avail themselves in
election times. Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak have placed
themselves in the spotlight cheering the bombardment
since the attacks began, hoping to enhance Kadima’s
and Labor’s electoral fortunes. And indeed Labor’s
polls are up 50 percent in the last six days.
Finally,
Israel has not won a war in 27 years. To add insult to
injury, the IDF suffered a humiliating defeat at the
hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. As Mark Heller,
chief research associate at the Institute For National
Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said on
Monday:
“Nobody’s
afraid of us today, the way they used to be… a big
reason for this operation [is] to restore credibility
in Israel’s ability to deter enemies.”
The irony, of
course, is that the current sociocide will swell the
ranks of Hamas and its sympathizers, much as Israel’s
Lebanon fiasco bolstered the prestige of Hezbollah.
But it is only global activism in solidarity with the
Palestinian people that will defeat Israel’s
colonialist designs and lethal hubris.
Alan Nasser
is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The
Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wa. His articles
have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review,
Commonweal, Common Dreams, Global Research and a
number of professional journals in economics,
philosophy, law and psychology.
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