What will happen next in Gaza?
The pause in hostilities in Gaza is an opportunity to reflect on the nature of Hamas, even if only because this explains what’s going to happen next.
Many assume Hamas is an anticolonialist resistance movement. That Hamas, because it attacked Israel, is a pro-Palestinian, nationalist organisation.
All of this is understandable because Hamas often employs the same language of the anti-colonial movement, and it talks a lot about the oppression of the Palestinian people. But all this is a facade. Its aim is not to ‘‘decolonise’’ Palestine but to exterminate Jews. It calls itself a ‘‘resistance’’ movement but it is actually genocidal.
It couldn’t care less about the Palestinian people. A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouk, was asked on October 27 why the organisation had built hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for itself instead of bomb shelters for the Palestinian people.
‘‘We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed,’’ he said in an interview. ‘‘These tunnels are meant to protect us from aeroplanes. We are fighting inside the tunnels.’’
And the Palestinian people? ‘‘Everybody knows that 75 per cent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees, and it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them,’’ Marzouk continued. Not our business, in other words.
This helps explain why Hamas fighters are happy to hide among Palestinian civilians even when it puts the innocent at risk from Israeli bombs.
Like the time in 2014 when it stashed weapons inside a vacant school in Gaza – located in between two other schools crammed with Palestinians who were using them as refugee shelters. All three schools were operated by the UN, which complained publicly about the arms cache. So it turns out Hamas isn’t even sincere when it says Palestinians can seek protection from the UN. It’s happy to turn UN buildings into targets, too.
And it helps explain why Hamas pillages the aid supplied to the Palestinians and turns it to its own purposes. Like the water pipelines for the people of Gaza, funded by the EU at a cost of about €100 million ($166 million). Hamas boasted in 2021 that it cut them up to make rockets.
And it is not a nationalist movement but a fanatical religious one. Its original charter, issued in 1988, stated that ‘‘Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes’’.
And it explains that while it’s prepared to maintain relations with the nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organisation, it rejects any merger because ‘‘secularism… contradicts religious ideology’’.
Hamas cleaned up its original charter in 2017. The new version omitted some of its wilder antisemitic conspiracies. The Jews caused World Wars I and II, didn’t you know? It also cut this telling verse from the original, translated by Yale University’s Avalon Project:
Hamas ‘‘aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said, ‘the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’’
The rewritten charter instead inserted language to appeal to the Western anti-colonialist movement by aping some of its favourite phrases, seeking favour among people in the West whom Lenin might have called ‘‘useful idiots’’.
And, in what appeared to be a major concession, the updated version accepted the prospect of a separate Palestinian state in coexistence with the enemy – a twostate solution, in other words – ‘‘as a formula of national consensus’’.
But a fuller reading shows this to be nothing more than a provisional and temporary expedient. ‘‘There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity,’’ says the new charter. And: ‘‘Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.’’
Did Benjamin Netanyahu buy any of the ‘‘new’’ Hamas? Not for a moment: ‘‘Hamas is attempting to fool the world,’’ his spokesman said at the time of the new charter, in 2017. So it’s doubly surprising that Netanyahu chose to help Hamas. From the time of his second prime ministership in 2009, he actually strengthened Hamas.
From 2012 to 2018, Netanyahu gave his approval for Qatar to transfer a cumulative total of about $US1 billion to Gaza, of which at least half went to Hamas, as Dmitry Shumsky of Hebrew University explains.
‘‘Netanyahu developed and advanced a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would be good for Israel,’’ says Shumsky, professor of the history of Zionism, writing in Haaretz on October 11. ‘‘The purpose of the doctrine was to perpetuate the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.’’ By keeping the two apart, Netanyahu wanted to sabotage any possibility of negotiations for a two-state solution.
The Hamas-Netanyahu symbiosis is not exactly a secret. A former head of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, told newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013, ‘‘over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu’’.
So Netanyahu must press on with his stated aim of destroying Hamas. If he’s to have any hope of remaining prime minister after this war, he must prove to his people that he’s killed the monster he fed and nurtured.
More likely, much as they sustained each other in life, they will join each other in a double helix of tandem demise.
Article link: https://todayspaper.smedia.com.au/smh/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=SMH20231128&entity=Ar02201&sk=0EBC9425&mode=textArticle source: Sydney Morning Herald / The Age | Peter Hartcher | 28.11.23
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