Palestinians are only militant Islam in disguise

Commentary on Netanyahu’s UNGA speech from 1) Nathan Brown, Jewish Forward and 2) Peter Beinart, Haaretz.

PM Netanyahu illustrates his point – Hamas and Isil are one and the same – at UNGA, September 29th, 2014.

Netanyahu’s Convenient Lies About ISIS and Hamas

By Nathan Brown, Jewish Forward
September 30, 2014

Speaking at the General Assembly this week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu repeated a refrain he has sounded for three decades (since his days as Israeli ambassador to the U.N.) — that all forms of terrorism are different sides of the same coin and have civilization as their target:

So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. And what they share in common all militant Islamists share in common. Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabab in Somalia, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Al-Nusra in Syria, the Mahdi army in Iraq, and the Al-Qaida branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere.

The startling assortment of groups; the lumping of a Shiite movement (Hezbollah) with those that can treat Shi‘a as apostates; the linking of Israel’s enemies with those now targeted by the United States — all this is politically convenient. But is it accurate?

Well, yes of course — in the same sense that France’s François Hollande, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Israel’s HaPoel Tel Aviv all spring from the same socialist movement. It’s not clear how such claims aid understanding, analysis or policy.

The rise of ISIS and its rivalry with other groups does pose a challenge but in a less direct way than Netanyahu suggests. In a visit earlier this month to Jordan, I found Da’ash (as ISIS is known according to its Arabic acronym) on everybody’s lips regardless of an individual’s political affiliation. Those of an Islamist bent regarded the upstart as a challenge and a rival, not an ally.

There seems to be some level of sympathy for Da’ash not because of the barbarity of its behavior but for its ability to threaten an international order that is seen as unjust. I spoke with Jordanian officials who seemed more concerned with the interest Da’ash generated among disaffected Jordanians than its actual core supporters.

But that places the leadership of some of the groups Netanyahu identifies in a very awkward position. On the one hand, they reject Da’ash’s ideas, methods, textual interpretations and agenda. On the other hand, they note that Da’ash defiance strikes some chords among the youth and that its actions grab agenda-setting attention. Their response is therefore somewhat guarded — to criticize Da’ash’s deeds and doctrines but in tones that fall far short of the horrified revulsion expressed elsewhere. The result sounds cagey and calculated — because it is.

Recent U.S. moves to engage Da’ash militarily may help these groups square the circle — not because the groups are all the same but because of the way in which they are rivals jostling for position. By turning their critical words against the U.S. — and thus shifting focus to the deeply unpopular U.S. military and security presence in most of the region — such rivals can maintain their distance from Da’ash without losing those whose inclinations might otherwise gravitate to more radical or disgruntled forces.

In two conversations with Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood leaders — one whose extremely hawkish views landed him in prison once and the other whose extreme dovish views have led to his estrangement from the movement — I was struck by the identical way they referred to Da’ash. They both brought it up (I was interviewing them for utterly unrelated work I’m doing on Islamic legal debates) and went on to describe it as a violent movement whose ways they found wrong but still saw as a product of the violence and occupation inflicted on the region. Such a stance was sincere — but also politically adept.

All actors are caught making some difficult political choices. Da’ash’s opponents of various stripes are trying to figure out how much they share and how much they can combat their foe militarily without aggravating the situation politically.

Israel likewise faces some difficult political choices with Hamas. Netanyahu’s formulation of the problem to an international audience may be politically useful in garnering sympathy for Israel in some circles. But when Israel turns its attention from speechifying to hard realities, it will likely conclude that its Hamas problem does not get easier by making it so much larger.

Nathan Brown is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Why Bibi is wrong to subsume the Palestinian issue under ‘militant Islam’

As George Orwell noted long ago, the best way to justify brutalizing a people is by turning them into a euphemism.

By Peter Beinart, Haaretz
October 01, 2014

“The old template for peace must be updated,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu this week at the United Nations. “It must take into account new realities.” In his speech, Bibi didn’t utter the words “Palestinian state.” That’s passé. Instead he called for Israel and “moderate” Sunni regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to “recognize the global threat of militant Islam [and] the primacy of dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.” Once those primary issues are solved, perhaps Jerusalem, Cairo and Riyadh can put their heads together and figure out something for the Palestinians.

There’s a lot to say about this analysis of the Middle East but one thing is clear: It’s not new. It’s an expression of the same core assumption that has guided Bibi since he entered politics more than two decades ago: The Palestinians don’t matter. They are merely a stalking horse for the forces that do.

Initially, they were a stalking horse for the Arab world’s war on Israel. In his 1993 book, “A Place Among the Nations,” Bibi repeatedly compares the “Palestinian people” (his quotes) to the similarly phony Sudeten Germans of the 1930s. As a way of dismembering Czechoslovakia, Netanyahu argued, the Nazis invented a mythical people called the Sudeten Germans, who just happened to live on territory Czechoslovakia desperately needed for its self-defense. Similarly, since Arab countries knew prying away the mountainous and thus militarily essential West Bank would doom Israel, “the Arab regimes have embarked on a campaign to persuade the West that the Arab inhabitants of these mountains (like the Sudeten Germans…) are a separate people that deserve the right of self-determination.”

In other words, the Palestinians don’t exist. They are the creation of an Arab world bent on Israel’s destruction.

In 2000, when he reissued” A Place Among the Nations” under the title “A Durable Peace,” Bibi still put “Palestinians” in quotation marks. Since then, he has grown more polite. He now acknowledges that the Palestinians exist. But they still don’t really matter. Today, instead of being a stalking horse for Arab nationalism, they’re a stalking horse for “radical Islam.”

“The issue for me is not the Palestinian problem,” Netanyahu explained while running for prime minister in October 2008. “I think that the conflict has been replaced by the battle between radical Islam and the western world.” Back then, “radical Islam” mostly meant Iran. An Israeli who spoke to him before his first trip to Washington as prime minister told me that Netanyahu said he would push President Obama to focus on the Iranian threat, and defer action on the peace process, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was peripheral to the real struggle in the Middle East. “There are deep differences between Israel and the United States,” admitted Netanyahu’s national security advisor, Uzi Arad, in July 2009. “Israel is saying, first Iran, then Palestine, whereas the United States is saying, first Palestine, then Iran.”

Bibi dismissed even the struggle against Hamas as mere cover for the struggle against Tehran. Rather than acknowledging that Hamas was an indigenous (if noxious) Palestinian movement, Bibi repeatedly described the group as a “proxy,” “surrogate” and “appendage” of Iran. (That claim grew harder once Hamas broke with Iran over Syria).

Now that America is at war with the Islamic State, Bibi claims that the Palestinian struggle is a stalking horse for it too. “When it comes to their ultimate goals,” he told the UN, “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.” And because both “are branches of the same poisonous tree”—militant Islam—Hamas and Islamic State are Iran too.

Having defined the Palestinians as just a branch of militant Islam’s tree (you’d never know listening to Netanyahu that not all Palestinians desire a caliphate), Bibi at the UN proposed that Israel join with Egypt, the Saudis and other Sunni powers to chop the tree down. When Islamic State is destroyed and Iran defanged, they can circle back and deal with the Palestinians. Although what that means is anyone’s guess since Bibi and his top advisors have virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state.

This kind of thinking isn’t new. It’s very old. As George Orwell noted long ago, the best way to justify brutalizing a people is by turning them into a euphemism. Segregationists once claimed that the challenge they faced in Alabama and Mississippi wasn’t African Americans seeking their freedom. It was “communism.” Vladimir Putin calls the Ukrainians resisting foreign invasion “fascists.” For Beijing, the protesters in Hong Kong are “imperialists.”

Benjamin Netanyahu is right to worry about Islamic State, an Iranian nuclear weapon, and Hamas. Each poses real, if distinct, threats. But Israel’s fundamental problem in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not an abstraction called “militant Islam.” And it cannot be solved in Cairo, Riyadh or Tehran. Israel’s problem is the millions of individual human beings whom it has controlled but refused to grant basic rights for almost fifty years. No matter how much Netanyahu keeps pretending that those people do not matter, they will keep reminding him that they do.

Links
Transcript of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the 2014 UN General Assembly

In his September 29 speech, the Israeli prime minister said peace was possible with fresh approach from Israel’s neighbours and called for the Arab peace initiative to reflect regional changes of recent years. Haaretz, September 29th, 2014