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Engaging Hamas and Hezbollah -by Ali Abunimah | |
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Editor's Note:
This is another superb article from Ali Abunimah, a
frequent contributor to Viewpoint.
The biggest criticism we get from readers is our "lack of
even handedness". Our response is always the same. Can one
be neutral about evil? Should one be neutral? Just as we
would never ask to be neutral concerning Nazism and other
forms of racism, we stand against injustice of all types.
We do not apologize for a lack of neutrality, we celebrate
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Engaging Hamas and Hezbollah -by Ali Abunimah
Nothing could be easier in the present atmosphere than to
accuse anyone who calls for recognition of and dialogue
with Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist movements of
being closet supporters of reactionary "extremism" or
naive fellow travelers of "terrorists." This tactic is
not surprising coming from neoconservatives and Zionists.
What is novel is to see it expressed in supposedly
progressive quarters.
Arun Kundnani has written about a "new breed of liberal"
whose outlook "regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and
in need of forceful integration into what it views as the
inherently superior values of the West." The target of
these former leftists, Kundnani argues, "is not so much
Islamism as the appeasing attitudes they detect among
[other] liberals." [1]
Such views are now creeping into the Palestinian solidarity
movement. MADRE, an "international women's human rights
organization," presents one example. In the wake of the
Hamas election victory and takeover of Gaza from US- and
Israeli-backed Fatah warlords, MADRE declared that the
challenge for Palestine solidarity activists is "how do we
support the people of Palestine without endorsing the Hamas
leadership?" Calling for what it terms "strategic
solidarity" as opposed to "reflexive solidarity," MADRE
defines Hamas as a "repressive" movement "driven by
militarism and nationalism," which "aims to institutional-
ize reactionary ideas about gender and sexuality," while
using "religion as a smokescreen to pursue its agenda." [2]
Similarly strident and dismissive claims have been made by
a Washington-based pro-Palestinian advocacy group. [3]
Some of these attitudes may arise from confusion, but there
may also be an effort to scare us off from attempting to
understand Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon out-
side any paradigm except a "clash of civilizations" that
pits allegedly universal and superior Western liberal
values against what is represented as medieval oriental
barbarity.
It is essential to note that the Islamist movements under
consideration, although they may identify themselves as
being part of the umma (the global community of Muslims)
are heterogeneous; each emerged in a particular context.
Their ideologies and positions are moving targets --
changing over time as a result of fierce and ongoing
internal debates and their encounters with external
influences. These points may seem obvious as they apply
to an analysis of any social or political movement, but
they have to be restated here because of the constant
effort to portray all Islamist movements as being,
inflexible, rooted in unchanging and ancient views of
the world, and indistinguishable from the most exotic,
marginal and unrepresentative "jihadi" groups.
Hamas and Hezbollah emerged in the context of brutal
Israeli invasions and military occupations. Their popular
support and legitimacy have increased as they demonstrated
their ability to present a credible veto on the unrestrain-
ed exercise of Israeli power where state actors,
international bodies, the peace process industry and
secular nationalist resistance movements notably failed.
As their influence has grown, both movements have steadily
tempered their universalist Islamist rhetoric and adopted
the language and imagery of classical national liberation
struggles albeit with an Islamist identity. A political
path that was pioneered by Hezbollah of recasting its
Islamist identity and goals within the constraints imposed
by pluralist national politics is now being trodden by
Hamas. [4]
Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that Hamas inflexibly
seeks the complete conquest of Palestine and the expulsion
of all Jews (aka "the destruction of Israel"), the movement
has moved over time to explicitly endorse a generation-long
truce with Israel and unspecified future political arrange-
ments that will be the outcome of negotiations. [5] Hamas
leaders have been able to justify this shift within the
Islamist concept of a hudna, but have also explicitly
modeled their approach on that of other modern national
liberation movements in Ireland, South Africa and Vietnam.
[6]
The much condemned use of violence by Hamas and Hezbollah --
particularly suicide bombings -- had more in common with
other nationalist movements facing foreign occupation,
than deriving from any "Islamist" ideology, as University
of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape demonstrated in
his book Dying to Win. Hezbollah has focused its military
strategy on countering Israeli military might, retaliating
against Israeli civilian areas only in response to Israeli
attacks on Lebanese civilians (as we saw in the July 2006
war). Hamas unilaterally suspended its notorious campaign
of suicide attacks on Israeli civilians more than two years
ago, again following the pattern of other groups like the
IRA that sought to enter a political process. Hamas main-
tains this suspension despite escalating Israeli attacks
and collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.
Both movements are renowned for providing access to health,
housing, jobs and income to the poorest segments of the
communities from which they draw support. Anti-Islamist
liberals understand this appeal, which is why a few have
supported the US, Israeli and EU sanctions against Hamas
in Gaza to prevent it from providing for its people, while
boosting support for Mahmoud Abbas' Ramallah regime in
the hope that it can buy back support and credibility.
Yet the trump card of anti-Islamist liberals remains the
claim that Islamist movements like Hamas are uniquely
oppressive to women, sticking to rigid ideologies which
prescribe for them a subordinate role. Here their
positions, if not their prescriptions, coincide with
that of the Bush administration which cynically claimed
that its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with all their
catastrophic consequences were partly motivated out of a
fervor to "free" the women of the region. (Ironically, as
journalist Susan Faludi has noted, these claims were made
while the "War on Terror" was simultaneously used by
American conservatives as a cover to reassert a more
virulent patriarchy at home). [7]
The claim that Hamas should be opposed (while "strategic
solidarity" should presumably be extended to other
Palestinian factions more amenable to a so-called Western
agenda) is based on a caricature of the movement's changing
gender ideologies and practices and ignores the achieve-
ments of the Islamist women's movement in Palestine.
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Spectacular examples of the courageous and radical role
Islamist women have played came last year when mass non-
violent actions by Palestinian women prevented Israeli air
raids and extrajudicial executions in Gaza. [8] But this
is only the visible tip of the iceberg.
As the work of Birzeit University professor Islah Jad has
demonstrated, the Islamist women's movement has played a
major role in transforming Hamas' ideology about women,
placing its demands at the center of internal debates,
and in mobilizing women within Hamas and in society at
large to play greater political and economic roles (sixty
percent of students at Gaza's Islamic University, for
example, are female).
Islamist women have challenged Western feminist discourses
that they deemed irrelevant to their circumstances and
needs. They have contended with contradictions in Islamist
thinking about the role of women that mirrored the un-
resolved contradictions that had long plagued the declining
secular nationalist movement. At the same time, these
Islamist women activists engaged positively with many of
the claims made by secular feminists, incorporating them
into an ever-changing Islamist nationalist discourse. [9]
Islamist women have emerged as an important factor in
Palestinian political life partly as a result of the
demobilization of the secular nationalist women's movement
as it became depoliticized, "NGOized," professionalized,
and detached from its grassroots. [10]
"There are traditions here that say that a woman should
take a secondary role -- that she should be at the back,"
said Jameela Shanti, one of Hamas' elected female members
of the Palestinian Legislative Council, "But that is not
Islam." Speaking after the January 2006 election, but
before the EU, US and Israeli effort to destroy the Hamas
government took hold, Shanti added, "Hamas will scrap many
of these traditions. You will find women going out and
participating." [11] Thus, the work of Islamist women,
especially within Hamas, deserves to recognized, respected
and engaged, not rendered invisible.
This is where we have to look beyond caricatures and
consider that for many of their adherents Islamist move-
ments are attractive because they offer the hope of
alternative forms of social organization that put the
human being and the community, rather than the market
and the consumer at the center of life.
In poor countries, neoliberal capitalism, extolled by
Western aid donors and their organs such as the IMF and
the World Bank as being the corollary of democracy, has
meant in practice unaccountable oligarchy, the demolition
of social welfare systems, public education, subsidies
for basic necessities, and the flourishing of crony
privatization on an epic scale. In many places, Islamist
movements have attempted to fill the void.
Hamas' changing views on a long-term truce with Israel,
on forms of resistance, and the role of women in society
are examples of how an Islamist movement -- like any other
social movement -- responds to the real circumstances of
the society of which it is part.
The dialogues that once intransigent colonial rulers and
their foreign backers opened with the African National
Congress (ANC) in South Africa, and Sinn Fein and the IRA
in Northern Ireland -- that led eventually to peaceful
transformations of those societies -- are the appropriate
model for how to engage with movements like Hamas and
Hezbollah today. Some argue that these cases offer no
precedent because Irish nationalists and the ANC were
always part of a unifying Christian, Western tradition.
That is how they may be viewed in hindsight, but like
Islamists, they too were once the objects of a dehumanizing
civilization discourse that cast them as irredeemably
inferior, alien and beyond inclusion, thus justifying
colonial control.
And like the leaders of those movements before, Hamas and
Hezbollah have been reaching out, attempting to craft
messages that can begin to close the seemingly unbridgeable
gaps, paying careful attention to their own constituencies
as well as their potential interlocutors. In Hamas' case
these invitations came in a remarkable series of op-eds by
its leaders published in English-language newspapers since
January 2006 including The Washington Post, The New York
Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. [12] European
and American governments have responded that any dialogue
must be conditioned on Hamas first accepting all of
Israel's demands, while Israel continues to have a free
hand.
Israel and its backers routinely dismiss Hamas' overtures
as insincere. They wave about the 1988 Hamas Charter --
which as current scholarship shows has little relevance or
influence on actual Hamas policies and thinking -- as an
excuse never to talk. Israel's propagandists used the same
tactic for years with the PLO Charter (or "covenant" as
they insisted on calling it). The increasing influence of
mainstream Islamists also terrifies the existing establish-
ments in the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states,
who in desperation to preserve their power, have joined
the chorus of fear-mongering and repression and some have
forged more or less open alliances with Israel.
When broader conflict looms, fueled by the ideology of the
clash of civilizations, and the American president drops
casual, smirking references to World War III, a new
approach is urgently needed. The European governments, for
example, that speak to Hamas in secret, but collude with
the brutal sanctions against Gaza, out of fear of the
United States, should break with their harmful and mis-
guided policies. They should openly defy Washington and
Tel Aviv and engage with Islamist movements in Lebanon
and Palestine and more broadly, on equal terms.
Since this change is unlikely in the short term, and the
dangers are great, it is the role of progressives to
support anti-colonial liberation movements without
imposing their own agendas, to push for equal dialogue,
to listen carefully to what Islamist movements are
saying, and to expose and resist the efforts to demonize
and dehumanize entire societies in preparation for new
wars.
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Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-
Palestinian Impasse
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