http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/
dec/30/gaza-hamas-palestinians-israel1/print.
From the ashes of Gaza
In the face of Israel's latest onslaught, the only option for
Palestinian nationalism is to embrace a one-state solution
Tariq Ali
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 December 2008 08.00 GMT
The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect
timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to
help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli
elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder
in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel.
Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to
be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.
Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with
Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU
politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective
punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all
the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy's chilling essay in the
London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks
that had "provoked" Israel but called on both sides to end the
violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in
Egypt and Nato's favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even
a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China
and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to
discuss the crisis.
As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will
be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the
ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating
in the "war against terror".
The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both
sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be
recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was
one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the
Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled
Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer.
The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more
than a supplicant for EU money.
Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its
policies are elected to office. The west and Israel tried everything
to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted
threats and bribes of the "international community" in a campaign that
saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or
assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, US and
EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US congressmen
announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run.
Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig
the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till
January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza ? in the
words of an Egyptian intelligence officer, "the public will then
support the Authority against Hamas."
Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption,
bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
Hamas's electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising
fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with
Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate
financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to
adopt the same policies as those of the party it had defeated at the
polls. Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority's combination of
greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and
policemen, and their acquiescence in a "peace process" that has
brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under
them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any
of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals,
vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders
and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people.
It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad
base of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.
How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional
degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like
those of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been
retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it
has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings,
Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was
starkly exposed during Hamas's unilateral ceasefire, begun in June
2003, and maintained throughout the summer, despite the Israeli
campaign of raids and mass arrests that followed, in which some 300
Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.
On August 19 2003, a self-proclaimed "Hamas" cell from Hebron,
disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in
west Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas
ceasefire's negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas, in turn, responded.
In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to
its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas
movement to be a terrorist organization ? a longstanding demand of Tel
Aviv.
What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat
is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing
groups resorted, but its superior discipline ? demonstrated by its
ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the
past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel
is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to
expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on
the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army
equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest-armed oppression
of modern history.
"Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been
suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation
force," said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military
intelligence, in 1993. The real grievance of the EU and US against
Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo
Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to
Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The west's
priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding
to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to
bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of
Abbas ? as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai
in Kabul ? at the expense of the legislative council is another.
No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian
leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to
western and Israeli interests, but it would not have been
unprecedented. Hamas' programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the
most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the
political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of
Israel altogether or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth
of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the
pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the
history of Fatah has shown.
The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the
satisfaction of western opinion, but whether it can break with this
crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas election victory in Gaza, I
was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place.
"Dissolve the Palestinian Authority" was my response and end the
make-believe. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on
its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources
be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal
in size ? not 80% to one and 20% to the other, a dispossession of such
iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the
long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews
and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are
repaired. There is no other way.
And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare
(in The Merchant of Venice), which I have slightly altered:
"I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a
Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the
same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same
winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if
you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we
will resemble you in that ? the villainy you teach me, I will execute;
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."
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