Hamas as leader of Palestinians
Amira Hass and Gideon Levy examine what gives Hamas its local power 1) and 2); PM Netanyahu on CNN tells the viewers that Hamas want the dead and injured people because it looks good on television 3).
Palestinian Fatah delegation chief Azzam al-Ahmed, Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip Ismail Haniya and Hamas deputy leader Musa Abu Marzuk pose for a photo as they celebrate in Gaza City on April 23, 2014 after West Bank and Gaza Strip leaders agreed to form a unity government within five weeks as peace talks with Israel face collapse. Under the rapprochement between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — internationally recognised as the sole representative of the Palestinian people — and the Islamist Hamas which rules Gaza, the sides agreed to form a ‘national consensus’ government within weeks. Photo caption Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images
The failures of Abbas’ leadership
Much of Hamas’ confidence comes from the Palestinian public, who see it standing up bravely for the national cause while Mahmoud Abbas plays the diplomatic supplicant.
By Amira Hass, Haaretz
July 20, 2014
Shock and paralysis have taken hold of the political world in the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, in light of the continued Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip and the enormous concern over the fate of 1.8 million people living in the small enclave. Condemnations by spokesmen for the PLO and the PA, calls to donate blood to Gaza and the establishment of a government emergency fund are “expressions of solidarity” – as if the residents of the Gaza Strip are a different people. These are not the steps of a leadership whose people are in mortal danger.
People in Gaza and the West Bank are shocked that senior leaders in the PLO and the PA – first and foremost PA President Mahmoud Abbas, or at least those closest to him – did not take the first obvious step of going to the Gaza Strip when the bloody conflict first broke out. This failure, critics say, has helped turn the conflict, as far as the world is concerned, into a face-off between Hamas and Israel, and not part of the policy of occupation and oppression of the entire Palestinian people.
On the organizational level, the bloody conflict required an immediate meeting of the temporary unified leadership (consisting of members of the PLO executive committee and heads of the organizations that are not members of the PLO, first among them Hamas and Islamic Jihad). The forming of this body was agreed on as far back as the reconciliation accord in Cairo in 2005. In fact, the united leadership should have met right after the Shati agreement (the April accord regarding the establishment of a reconciliation government headed by Rami Hamdallah).
The fact that it did not meet is a failure or evidence that Abbas’ heart was not in the national consensus government to begin with. Abbas ascribes great importance to negotiations with Israel and his connections with the United States, while it is becoming clearer to ever-widening circles in the PLO and Fatah that the obligation to build a unified leadership trumps everything else.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s cease-fire conditions sound very logical and moderate to Palestinians, among them members of the PLO’s factions, including Fatah. The secretary of the PLO executive committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, has said as much. Hamas’ demand to lift the siege highlights the lack of interest the PLO and Fatah leadership have in raising the struggle over the closure and segregation of the Gaza Strip. Abbas’ involvement in the failed Egyptian cease-fire initiative based on “quiet for quiet” is now considered a dangerous missed opportunity, whose costly price was more human lives. Another high price was paid in presenting the Palestinian president as a “mediator” instead of the leader of a people, thus deepening the internal rift. Abbas’ talks over the past few days with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders come too late and do not ameliorate the bitter impression.
On the other hand, members of the PLO do not want a full-on confrontation with Egypt or to seem like they are getting involved in its internal affairs – that is, taking a stand on the oppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. Traditionally, the PLO’s factions have been suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood as a supranational political body that uses religion. Fatah, in particular, claimed for years that Hamas’ ideology and its politics of military confrontation are not motivated by a national agenda, but rather by that of the Brotherhood.
The small left wing eschews the kind of society to which Hamas aspires. But in recent weeks, it has become clear that Hamas has been able to present a challenge to Israel greater than any Israel has ever faced from a Palestinian organization – and, in the opinion of the Palestinian public, for justifiable reasons. This has also impressed those who despise Hamas’ political-religious path, as well as those who are not blinded by worship of the armed struggle.
The failures in the conduct of the PLO factions, including Fatah – particularly since the outbreak of this round of bloodshed – are not a local and temporary issue. Rather, they show ongoing failures, some of which are connected to the character of Abbas’ rule. In recent years he has managed to minimize any democratic process of consultation and joint decision making in Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. The secular political factions, among them Fatah, have been sidelined as irrelevant, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad are increasingly regarded as leading the struggle against the occupation in the name of the Palestinian people. According to key people in the political factions, there must be a real change in the quality, course of action and discourse of the PLO. Otherwise a vacuum will be created that, at best, will be filled by nationalist Islamic groups, and at worst will invite social, political and security chaos.
Read the list of conditions published in the name of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them.
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz
July 20, 2014
After we’ve said everything there is to say about Hamas: that it’s fundamentalist; that it’s undemocratic; that it’s cruel; that it does not recognize Israel; that it fires on civilians; that it’s hiding ammunition in schools and hospitals; that it did not act to protect the population of Gaza – after all that has been said, and rightly so, we should stop for a moment and listen to Hamas; we may even be permitted to put ourselves in its shoes, perhaps even to appreciate the daring and resilience of this, our bitter enemy, under harsh conditions.
But Israel prefers to shut its ears to the demands of the other side, even when those demands are right and conform to Israel’s own interests in the long run. Israel prefers to strike Hamas without mercy and with no purpose other than revenge. This time it is particularly clear: Israel says it does not want to topple Hamas – even Israel understands that instead it will have Somalia at its gates – but it is also unwilling to listen to Hamas’ demands. Are they all “animals”? Let’s say that’s true. But they are there to stay, even Israel believes that’s the case, so why not listen?
Last week 10 conditions were published in the name of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, for a 10-year cease-fire. We may doubt whether these were in fact the demands of those organizations, but they can serve as a fair basis for an agreement. There is not one unfounded condition among them.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad demand freedom for Gaza. Is there a more understandable and just demand? There is no way to end the current cycle of killing, and not have another round in a few months, without accepting this. No military operation, by air, ground or sea, will bring a solution; only a basic change of attitude toward Gaza can ensure what everyone wants: quiet.
Read the list of demands and judge honestly whether there is one unjust demand among them: withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces troops and allowing farmers to work their land up to the fence; release of all prisoners from the Gilad Shalit swap who have been rearrested; an end to the siege and opening of the crossings; opening of a port and airport under UN management; expansion of the fishing zone; international supervision of the Rafah crossing; an Israeli pledge to a 10-year cease-fire and closure of Gaza’s air space to Israeli aircraft; permits to Gaza residents to visit Jerusalem and pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque; and an Israeli pledge not to interfere in internal Palestinian politics such as the unity government; opening Gaza’s industrial zone.
These conditions are civilian; the means of achieving them are military, violent and criminal. But the (bitter) truth is that when Gaza is not firing rockets at Israel, nobody cares about it. Look at the fate of the Palestinian leader who had had enough of violence. Israel did everything it could to destroy Mahmoud Abbas. The depressing conclusion? Only force works.
The current war is a war of choice, a choice that we had. True, after Hamas started firing rockets, Israel had to respond. But as opposed to what Israeli propaganda tries to sell, the rockets didn’t fall out of the sky from nowhere. Go back a few months: the breakdown of negotiations by Israel; the war on Hamas in the West Bank following the murder of the three yeshiva students, which it is doubtful Hamas planned, including the false arrest of 500 of its activists; stopping payment of salaries to Hamas workers in Gaza and Israeli opposition to the unity government, which might have brought the organization into the political sphere. Anyone who thinks all this would simply be taken in stride must be suffering from arrogance, complacence and blindness.
Terrifying amounts of blood are being spilled in Gaza – and in Israel to a lesser extent. It is being spilled in vain. Hamas is beaten down by Israel and humiliated by Egypt. The only chance for a real solution is exactly the opposite of the way Israel is going. A port in Gaza to export its excellent strawberries? To Israelis this sounds like heresy. Here once again, the preference is for (Palestinian) blood over (Palestinian) strawberries.
Hamas wants to pile up ‘telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause’ — Netanyahu, on television
By Alex Kane and Phil Weiss, Mondoweiss
July 20, 2014 27
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer got a one-on-one with Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him about the disturbing optics of the Gaza onslaught, in which Israel has now killed hundreds of civilians, many of them children:
You see these painful pictures though of these Palestinian children and these refugees, thousands of them, fleeing their homes. It’s a horrendous sight right now– if you look at the images, heart-wrenching. What goes through your mind when you see that?
Netanyahu:
I’m very sad. When I see that I’m very sad. We’re sad for every civilian casualty. They’re not intended. This is the difference between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately hides behind civilians. They imbed their rocketeers, their rocket caches, their other weaponry, which they use to fire on us in civilian areas… What choice do we have?…
All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said, and I mean, it’s gruesome, but they use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause. They want– the more dead the better.
This is the Israeli talking point. David Brooks of the New York Times, who has said that he is an ardent supporter of Israel, said on public radio Friday that
Hamas has basically decided they want to see their own people killed as a propaganda coup. And I think here again the administration – Bill Clinton and others – have named things very accurately. And what we’re seeing is sort of a desperate Hamas trying to gin up some sort of publicity coup through the death of their own people.
Brooks is referring to these comments by Bill Clinton:
[Hamas has] a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them….
In the short and medium term Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage by forcing (Israel) to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas.
P.S. And what is Wolf Blitzer’s role here, to promote the Israeli PM? Writes Medea Benjamin.
Medea Benjamin @medeabenjamin
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Morning TV had @wolfblitzer on #CNN giving LOTS of airtime to Netanyahu with NO Palestinian response. No wonder Americans so misinformed.
3:50 PM – 20 Jul 2014
Thanks to Annie Robbins.