A Letter to Bruce Cain #4
Different Takes on Hamas #1
Dear Bruce,
You and many others seem to think that the current war on Gaza is somehow related to Hamas because this is exactly what the main stream media (MSM) would have us think. Yet the question remains as to what exactly Hamas actually is and the scope of its responsibility for this current tragedy.
Here are a few voices on this topic:
“Given its stunning victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in early 2006,” Ambassador Dennis Ross (U.S. Envoy to the Middle East, 1988–2000) tells us “Hamas is no longer a fringe player in the Palestinian political scene. While the champion of suicide bombing against Israelis, Hamas has developed an appeal among Palestinians for several reasons: It is not corrupt in the sea of corruption that has so characterized the Palestinian Authority. It provides services—clinics, after-school programs, food distribution centers—that the Palestinian Authority fails to offer. It has demonstrated that it can hurt Israelis when, in the eyes of Palestinians, the Israelis have been hurting them.”[1]
“When Harakat al Muqawamah al Islamiyyah, or the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Jennifer Jefferis opines “burst onto the Palestinian political scene at the start of the first Intifada in the late 1980s, they did so with a clear mission. They would transform the conflict that had been raging between the Palestinians and Israel for the past several decades, propelled by the righteousness of their cause. That righteousness came in the form of a religious mandate to make Palestine a state that allowed citizens to fulfill their purpose as servants of God. In contrast to the more secular nationalist perspective of the previously sole representative of the Palestinian people, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas promised that their nationalism was both pure and uncompromising. By introducing this method of righteous resistance, Hamas swirled the ideas of religion, nationalism, and resistance into a potent cocktail.”[2]
“Hamas (an Arabic language acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah or the Islamic Resistance Movement) is the jihadist terror organization that is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. Executive Chairman Center for Security Policy, wrote in May 2019.
“Hamas was established in the Gaza Strip in 1987, and its toxic Covenant was published a year later. Invoking the name of the Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna, that document states unequivocally that the organization exists to annihilate the Jewish State of Israel and replace it with an Islamic State: ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).’”
“Designated by the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 1997, Hamas consistently has used violent terror attacks against Israel, especially by its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in obedience to the Islamic doctrine that drives its aggression. Key members of the jihadist leadership that formed Hamas just a few years after the Oslo Accords had been signed remain in control of the group to this day. Indeed, their implacable hatred of Jews and Israel took inspiration from those agreements, which, contrary to Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture, were intended to establish a durable peace between Muslims and Jews.”[3]
Most interesting of all is the take of Tareq Baconi: “My fixer in Gaza told me a story. There was once a village whose men were all drafted to fight in some faraway battle. While the men were gone, enemy soldiers invaded the village and raped all the women who had been left behind and went on their way. The women, shell-shocked and bloodied, mourned their fate as they congregated to com- fort one another in the village square. One woman was missing. They went looking for her and found her lying under the soldier who had tried to rape her. With her own hands, she had managed to kill him and save herself from the lot of her fellow villagers. Joy at her safety soon soured. The raped women now worried they would be judged by their husbands for not similarly fighting for their honor and fending off their rapists. In no time, this undefiled survivor became a symbol of their shame. Swiftly, they conspired to kill her.”
“The storyteller turned to me and said, that woman, the survivor, is Gaza. She has refused to submit to Israel’s occupation and its rape and pillage of Palestinian land while other Palestinian and Arab leaders have succumbed. She has become a source of pride for Gazans who maintain their armed resistance against Israel. She is now a shameful reminder for those who have accepted their fate. Arabs and Palestinians elsewhere have looked away as she is bombarded, incessantly and mercilessly. Israel has focused all its efforts on shaming and breaking it. For she remains the only proud bit of Palestine that refuses to yield. One only needs to walk the streets of Gaza to feel the pride that people take in “the resistance.” In countless conversations, I was reminded that while the Israeli army can drive up to any house in the West Bank and arrest its members — even to the house of the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas! — it was unable to step foot in Gaza. At least not without incurring a beating. This strip of land is thought of as undefiled, Palestinian, sterile of Israel’s occupation.”
“Of course, the occupation persists, but it is no longer in people’s homes. Palestinians in Gaza celebrate being able to go about their lives without the daily indignities of having Israeli teenagers armed with rifles harass and humiliate them. Close to the buffer zone with Israel, Gazans have paved a road called shari‘al-jakar, literally translated as “street of spite,” as a symbolic claim to sovereignty, spiting their previous overlords by proving they can pave their own roads without Israel’s permission. The deep satisfaction derived from such an action is easily understood. Driving around the land where the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip had once stood, one can see the wide multilane high- ways that used to connect the Jewish-only settlement blocks where eight thousand inhabitants lived. Extending alongside them are the dusty, potholed one-lane roads that the 1.8 million Palestinians had been forced to use. Against this blueprint of Israel’s colonization of Gaza, Palestinians are now free to build their own infrastructure, wherever they want. And the pleasure felt from this sense of liberty, of quasi sovereignty, is immense. This is so even when everyone understands all too well how truncated such sovereignty is. In matters of life and death, Israel’s occupation grinds on relentlessly in the form of an external structure of control on a besieged population. But within this prison cell, Gazans have staked their flag.”[4]
[1] p.ix HAMAS, politics, charity, and terrorism in the service of jihad, Matthew Levitt
[2] p.3 Hamas, Terrorism, Governance, and Its Future in Middle East Politics, Jennifer Jefferis
[3] p.1 Hamas, The Story of Islamic Jihad on Israel’s Front Lines, Ilana Freedman
[4] Preface, xv-xvii, HAMAS CONTAINED, Tareq Baconi