 | | The following is an excerpt from a recent editorial published in “The New Left Review.” The full text of the article may be found at:
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27201.shtml
Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney-Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice Admiral Cebrowski summer up the linkage of capitalism to war: “the dangers against which the US forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization.” Five years later, what is the balance sheet?
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On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’, ‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every Latin American country. [1]
More alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is slipping. No irreversible setbacks have yet occurred, but in the past year the position of the us in the region has weakened. The shift has not been uniform—at least one front has moved in the opposite direction, with a successful intervention in Lebanon. But elsewhere the tide of events is running against Washington. In Iran and Palestine, elections have humiliated those on whom it had counted as pliable instruments or interlocutors, propelling more radical forces into power. In Iraq, the resistance has inflicted a steady train of blows on the us occupation, preventing any stabilization of the collaborator regime and sapping support for the war in America itself. The Cheney–Wolfowitz political project of establishing a model satellite state for the region lies buried underneath the rubble of Fallujah. In Afghanistan, guerrillas are on the move again and Washington is wooing Taliban factions close to Pakistani military intelligence. Further revelations of torture by us and British forces, and plunder of local resources by the invaders and their agents, have intensified popular hatred of the West across the Arab world. American forces are overstretched, and the belief of troops in their mission is declining. Establishment voices at home are beginning to express fears that a debacle comparable to—or even worse than—Vietnam may be looming. But outcomes across the whole theatre of conflict still remain uncertain, and are unlikely to be all of a piece.
Palestine
Western enthusiasm for rainbow revolutions stops, as is to be expected, when the colour is green. Hamas’s triumph in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council has been 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 have been applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the polls. Numerically, the extent of that victory should not be overstated—with 45 per cent of the vote on a 78 per cent turnout, Hamas took 54 per cent of the seats. But morally, given the undisguised intervention by Israel, the us and the eu to assure a Fatah majority, the result was equivalent to a landslide. 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’. [2] Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
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 basis 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 which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank. [3] On 19 August 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 long-standing 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 forty-five years against occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. [4]
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 now is 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 Bremer in Baghdad—at the expense of the Legislative Council is another. [5] But since each of these involves some risk of boomeranging, more likely is an attempt to domesticate Hamas, in the belief that it too will relax with the fruits of office, and become in time as ‘pragmatic’ as its predecessor. This is certainly a reasonable calculation. Hamas is historically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Egyptian branch is now scarcely more radical in outlook than the ruling party in Turkey. [6] Like all religions, Islam offers a complete palette of ideological positions, from fulsome collaboration with capital and empire to impassioned opposition to them, with a great deal of mobility in between.
Whether Hamas could be so rapidly suborned to Western and Israeli ends may be doubtful, but it would not be unprecedented. Hamas’s 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. To do that would require the Palestinian national cause to be put on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equally, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent 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 that outlined by Virginia Tilley in this issue: a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. [7]
notes:
[1] Over the last few years, Chávez has visited the major countries in every continent, embarrassing some of his hosts by demanding a global front against imperialism. His hour-long interview on al-Jazeera had an electric impact on 26 million Arab viewers. It received the station’s largest ever email response—tens of thousands—with the bulk of them posing a simple question: why can’t the Arab world produce a Chávez.
[2] Graham Usher, ‘The New Hamas’, merip, 21 August 2005.
[3] By the end of 2004, Israeli death squads and helicopter gunships had assassinated much of the Hamas leadership—Sheikh Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, Ibrahim Makadmeh, Adnan Ghoul, Sheikh Khalil—and tried but failed to kill Muhammad Dayf, Mahmoud Zahhar, and possibly Khaled Meshaal and Musa Abu Marzuq in Damascus.
[4] Yediot Aharonot, 12 August 1993, cited in Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Washington 2000.
[5] For this hopeful prospect, see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley: ‘Insofar as the burden has shifted to Hamas, the us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film.
[6] In the late 60s and 70s the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood stood by as their secular plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona.
[7] Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor and Manchester 2005. For nlr’s positions on what a viable two-state solution might entail, see Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, Guy Mandron, ‘Redividing Palestine?’, Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, Yitzhak Laor, ‘Tears of Zion’, nlr 10, July–August 2001.
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